I started this blog to write about television. Programmes that I watch and like or dislike and stuff that’s going on in the industry that other people might be interested in. For the past 14 years I’ve written about the media professionally and I still just about earn a living as a freelance media journalist.
But another massive part of my life is bringing up my two children with my life partner. Just over four years ago, we decided to move out of London to rural Somerset. Quelle horreur. Like thousands before us, we’re adjusting from being city-dwellers with bars and restaurants and careers at our finger tips to being bumpkins who, frankly, haven’t a bl**dy clue what’s happening in the worlds of culture or gastronomy and who drive for 60 minutes just to find a decent pair of Levi’s. But we have our health.
And that’s really the point because, again like thousands of others, I decided after 12 years of working in an office in London that there must be more to life, that there must be other ways of making (slightly less) money and that if I wanted to have kids there really wasn’t much point in simply paying other people to look after them for me. How I rue the day I had that particular idea.
Sometimes I yearn for an office and colleagues, for the status and access to exciting events that comes with a full-time job in a dynamic industry. The rest of the time I’m happy to potter about in my mortgage-free home and I love the fact that the beautiful Dorset coast is only 30 minutes from my front door (look! no traffic jams!) and that I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission if I want to go to the school sports day or try to keep a miserable child entertained when she’s too ill to go to school.
So, you know. It’s swings and roundabouts, this country versus city, self-employed versus full-time thing.
Here, I plan to post stuff about what preoccupies me as a parent and person rather than a media journalist. There are a couple of things to bear in mind. My partner’s mother might be reading. And my children may read this, if not this year then perhaps, in a world where we’re told all electronic communication will exist to damn us FOR ALL TIME, in the future. So I may not be quite as unleashed as I always want to be. But here goes.