New beginnings

THERE'S a wonderful line in Matt Smith's first episode of Doctor Who when a youngster who has suddenly found a ragged stranger at the bottom of her garden asks who he is.

"I don't know yet," says the newly-regenerated Time Lord. "I'm still cooking."

It sort of sums up how I find myself at the minute, as I cross the half-way point of the three score year and ten.

I've always understood this is supposed to be your "settling down" decade, it's when you start to lay roots or reap the fruit or some other slightly muddled gardening metaphor.

Instead my early middle age increasingly seems dominated by things most people are wrestling with in their late teens - essays, driving lessons and visits to career websites.

Throughout what has been a chronic chronological jumble - which certainly feels like it owes a fair amount to a Steven Moffat script -  I've tried to hold on to the idea that my occupation won't be a question mark indefinitely. 

Our job titles have long been one of the defining things about us. This was already the case in the early modern era I've recently been studying as part of my history course, when people earned a living as merchants and brewers and tenant farmers. So central was a trade to someone's identity that centuries later old family businesses survive in surnames ranging from Cooper and Fletcher to the apparently ubiquitous Smith (it's amazing how pervasive iron-pummelling apparently was back then).

While many of these old professions haven't continued into the 21st century there is still a sense that, contrary to Tyler Durden's objections in Fight Club, we are very much "our job".

This point is pressed home by anyone who has seen Alexander Armstrong introduce an accountant from Colchester or a bus driver from Harrogate on a tea-time edition Pointless. 

I think I've felt this more keenly than most for a number of reasons:

Firstly I'm still only a son and brother, not a father nor a husband. Where I live and my hometown are still one and the same. I don't own a fast car, a slow cooker or even an air fryer. These facts have probably lent an extra significance to my livelihood over the years. 

There's also no doubt that journalism has a reputation for being both interesting (which it certainly is) and lucrative (which it almost certainly isn't). Even if a person harbours an instinctive dislike of reporters, the chances are they've met few enough to be half-way curious when they come across you. 

This has proven handy over the years as it has provided no shortage of anecdotes to an otherwise keen teetotaller who enjoys jigsaw puzzles and folklore.

Last but not least, journalism proved formative in a way that being noisily sick in a local park or getting your heart broken in Naples is for other people. An old friend recently noted that reporting brought me out of my shell, once I'd learned that interviewing cabinet ministers was a skillset that could also be applied in other less formal settings where Secretary of States were otherwise absent.

In my late teens I had to get used to the fact I was wearing a shirt and a tie and coming out of council meetings at the time of night many of my mates were probably just heading out to the sort of places young people who don't attend the transport and highways meeting head.

And it never ceased to feel strange that the work experience students I was expected to offer sage advice to about their future careers were still, in many instances, a couple of years older than me. It's hard to act like a veteran when you've got a haircut like that kid from Outnumbered and your experience of management extends to crushing imp mutinies on Dungeon Keeper.

The general craziness came to a head when at the same age as Ian Hislop I was suddenly and unexpectedly editing an actual proper newspaper. Unlike the Private Eye prodigy I was never successfully sued or - rather more disappointingly - paid for my trouble. But I did get to slam the phone down on someone who had threatened to throttle me. I enjoyed that bit. 

All this considered it inevitably feels odd after 15 years ago to be an ex or former journalist.

It was the profession I'd either been training for, working in or trying to get back to from the end of my teens to 18 months or so ago.

Yes granted there was a brief interlude as a copywriter, but that was an utterly loveless posting during which I actually considered the real day's work the hour or two I spent in the evening updating my hyperlocal blog. 

It was a sobering reminder of just how awful work can be when you end up doing something you utterly loathe and largely killed off any sense for me that any similar move "sideways" was worth pursuing. I needed an equivalent of Iron Man's "Clean Slate" protocol - although I didn't intend to show the same careless disregard for my suits as Tony Stark. Even in a word of hybrid working I'm aware I might need them again in future. 

The decision to formally announce the end of the blog earlier this year felt significant, even if in reality it was something I'd stopped updating regularly during the worst of the pandemic. 

A lot of the jobs which were all part of signing-off were done within weeks of my resignation. Shorthand notepads - the residual safeguard against a belated libel action - were stashed in the cloakroom. I shut down my "blue tick" Twitter account (saving Elon Musk the effort) and cancelled my NUJ membership.

Officially mothballing the blog was perhaps more final, as it was the part of being a reporter that I'd been able to continue even during the grim interlude when my actual salary derived from writing some guff for solicitors' LinkedIn profiles. But it felt like it was time to do it.

Overall I feel cautiously optimistic that I might find my way to a career that matters to me the way reporting used to matter. My course is going well and while there is something of a leap between a qualification and a vocation I'm starting to have an idea of concrete jobs I could feasibly do.

Importantly I want a role that links to the past, which rather like putting words in a pleasing order I have a passion for and a decent understanding of.

Last month I started training modules offered by Historic England on conservation of historic building. Working in this corner of the heritage sector feels like it would be meaningful in the way reporting used to be - before regional newsrooms became obsessed with Wetherspoons menus and I got properly disillusioned about the role the press played in wider society.

On one hand of course the job market is not as forgiving as perhaps it was in the late noughties; budgets are shrinking, people are upskilling and some mix of practical experience is increasing a prerequisite to even being considered. 

That said this time I have the benefit of the various skills I've picked up. Advising on historic sites for a local council feels like it would draw on my knowledge of the past, my already solid grasp of local government and my ability to put words in intelligible order at speed.

And as daunting as a reboot in later life might be it's not half as scary as being the quietest kid in the class launching himself into career where asking questions was the bread and butter. 

As things stand I've never dug up dinosaurs in Wyoming or become the author of a best-selling series of novels about werewolves - as was my ambition at various times in earlier life. 

But I suppose I take comfort that I did something meaningful for 15 years, avoiding the fate of long-distance lorry driver or school librarian which early noughties career algorithms seemed intent to drive me towards. Now I just need to repeat the same trick.