The world from my window

I'm all-a-jitter this week. Four years of work has come to an end, and by Friday I'll know whether it's been worth it. At the beginning of the new century, I promised myself I'd get a degree by the time I was fifty. My birthday is fast approaching and so, I hope, is the postman. Back in the late 1970s, I went straight into journalism training. I didn't want to go to unversity, partly because that path was what had been expected of me for years (and I never do the expected). I also didn't think it was right to spend three self-indulgent years poncing around lonely as a cloud when I could dive straight into a Devon newsroom. I'd wanted to be a newspaper reporter since I was ten years old so, I figured, why wait? But the main reason for not going to university was I rather mucked up my chances. On the day I was due to take my biology O-Level I gave birth to Number One Daughter. So, in 2007 and several careers later, I signed up for an honours degree w...

It's a big weekend, with two major events coming up. A reunion with people I trained with as a journalist three decades ago and the village highlight of the year. When I was asked if I wanted to join the 1979 gang on Friday night as well as the Saturday, I could hear guffaws and giggles through cyberspace when I replied: 'I'm sorry, but it's the village harvest supper and I'm part of the entertainment.' I never was going to amount to very much, I can hear them thinking, even in 1979. But I only ever wanted to be a big fish in a small pond, never a tiddler in a wide open ocean. I'd wanted to be a local newspaper journalist from the age of about nine, after quickly abandoning my first choice of being a zoo keeper on Animal Magic . However, my careers adviser at big school suggested I should try being a librarian. 'Journalism is far too competitive, dear,' she said. But I was determined, even when a major calamity hit in my fifth year at comprehensive. ...