Another year, another Christmas come and gone. I’m back at the flat after a week up north with the parents. Billy Ocean is playing on the Bluetooth speaker as I write – Stay the Night – and the torrential rain that followed me south stopped about an hour or two ago. Everything is more or less as I left it, with the exception of fresh sheets on the bed.
It’s been nearly six years since I took up my post here, moving back to England from Spain. I sometimes wonder what direction my life might have taken had I stayed on and taken up the teaching post I had on the cards in Galicia, but I know I made the right decision for my career. Over the course of those six years, I’ve earned my stripes (and, more importantly, qualifications) as a fully-fledged teacher within the British educational system, enrolled in a number of courses and taken on more responsibilities than I expected, up to and including being an Oxford-style debating judge. There hasn’t been a day in those six years when I’ve woken up dreading the day ahead or resenting my job – not even in my PGCE year, which was shot right through the heart by the COVID pandemic. I love teaching, I love my subject, and the knowledge that I am keeping up a family tradition that goes back generations gives me an eternal flame that cannot be extinguished.
But that’s not to say living and working in a boarding school has been without its doubts. I’ve definitely had some bad days – who hasn’t? – and I’m very aware that my choice of career (coupled with my lingering anxiety about responding to messages) has had a good hand in shrinking my social circle with every passing year. A senior member of staff at the school once described living and working in a boarding school as “submarining”; that is, disappearing from the rest of the world at the start of term and resurfacing only once the last child has left the building, some three months later. It’s an apposite analogy, and one that’s hard to sell to anybody outside the system.
I suspect that after six years in the same school – nearly long enough to see a generation of students through their whole educational journey – it’s natural to start to feel the need for a change. As for where that change will take me, I’m not yet sure. I only know that change is coming, and it would do me a world of good to seek my destiny somewhere beyond the horizon. Perhaps the idea came to me on the Camino and has been incubating ever since, or perhaps it crystallized after a conversation with a colleague about how it’s very easy to count the things you do for others in this line of work, but on reflection, it can be a lot harder to say what you’ve done for yourself. I’ve been lucky enough to have a partner to guide and support me through the greater part of those five-and-a-half years, but December finds me on my own once again, and as the months start to fall away before the big three-zero, I’m conscious that the career path I desire is out of reach until Lady Luck sees fit to give me another chance. And since the online dating scene has been about as generous as a paddling pool is to a fisherman of late, it’s probably time I upped sticks.
With that thought in mind, I’m starting to look at the world around me with fresh eyes. The flat that’s been my home for two years now seems more detailed than before. The cat-print mug on my desk that probably belongs to my housemaster, containing a shamrock-green bauble, a gift from a Colombian parent. The collage of photos in an IKEA frame of friends from my university days, all but two of whom I haven’t seen in years. Curios on my dresser: a boomerang, a vinyl cover of Fidder on the Roof and three chips from a Las Vegas casino. Photos on my bookshelf: my class of 4° ESO from Villafranca (my first real job), my cousins, the windmills of La Mancha and my mother’s first car, an orange Volkswagen beetle. The mirror that never made it onto the wall, and the blocky but practical Skorva bed that has put in a good year’s shift after the last one finally collapsed after a marathon service (it was a veteran when it came into my possession over a decade ago). Some of these things haven’t moved an inch in two years.
I’m not usually one for resolutions, but I am going to take more of a handle on my own future in 2024. I’ve already thrown the first stone by committing to weekly driving lessons, and while it may be some time yet before I have wheels of my own, that crucial piece is finally on the board. Fortune has given me a later return to work than usual, so I have seized the chance to ring in the New Year with my cousins in Spain, something I have wanted to do ever since we first reconnected back in 2018. It may be that my next post doesn’t have an international airport within walking distance, so I might as well make the most of it while I still can.
I’ll also try to write some more. I’ve been channeling my creative endeavours into the creation of a Spanish culture podcast, but it wouldn’t hurt to flex my writing arm some more on here every once in a while. Even if I’m the only one who comes back and re-reads these posts, it makes for an interesting insight into my mindset at various points of my career.
I’ll check in again tomorrow. Until then – tschuss! BB x