• Home
• UK Politics
• World Politics
• Policy
• Media
• Lifestyle
• Sport
• Contributors
• Topics

Hate Your Job?

Tony Horne says you will miss the company...if not the company.

By Tony Horne

8 Feb 2012, 09:00

On Sunday I went public again.

I’ve been away from these pages and almost anything high profile pretty much since my radio show ended last July. Until that point, that was all I knew. Straight out of Exeter University and on to a breakfast show in Wiltshire and haven’t looked back since 1993. Indeed, even as a student I did five hours on air every single week night.

I have to tell you it has been both heaven and hell lying low. My days would come alive at night – from 6.45pm to around 10pm, I would open a red and ghost-write this cracking little book which is coming out in the summer. I lived for those nights, seven days a week, right through the autumn.

Then there was the hell. I couldn’t get up any more. Eighteen years, I rose with the cock at half four on six hours sleep. Suddenly I needed ten – and probably more. I no longer had that thing to get up for, and I realised I had been carrying “knackeredness” for years!

I would drag the school run out in the morning via the shop, chatting to a mate on the corner, tidy up the house, go to playgroup with my little one, watch more Peppa Pig and make all the teas and packed lunches – the stuff my current wife has been doing for years which used to appear by magic.

Of course, I loved having a six month sabbatical, becoming so close to my Poppy who turns three next month. My mate said I would regret not being out pissed every night when I returned to “work” but any parent knows that I can’t get that time back again with the little one.

At playgroup, I loved being the only Dad, seeing who would talk to me this week. Equally, I took enormous life experience from finding out who my friends were. I can tell you everyone calls in that first two weeks you disappear, but after that only a handful bother.

Autumn rolled on into December and suddenly there was a problem. I had thrown everything at this book, oblivious to the real world, finishing it two months before the deadline. I even sent back my lease car since I rarely left the house apart from for school!

But now, as I re-surface, I don’t know what Jessie J’s latest song sounds like, I couldn’t tell you who won X-Factor or I’m A Celeb. I did watch Piers Morgan at the Leveson enquiry plus  every England cricket match and just about turned my news radar a couple of weeks back to see a cruise ship sinking. Beyond that, I know nothing. I’m blissfully out of the game – which is no good for work, of course.

I realised in December that it was time to get back out there, and I write this for anyone who has a career break, maternity leave, gets fired, or comes back from building a hut in Ethiopia for a year. It’s terrifying! I have never had a CV in my life – my paperwork was always my next radio show/column/book and now I didn’t know what to do next!

Body language at meetings? –  I had no idea how average I looked. The best bit was convincing people that you genuinely wanted to work for them. My mate runs a McDonald’s – I told him I want to meet people and I’d like free burgers. “Why would you want to work here?” was the answer.

Because I wanted to do anything that I hadn’t done before.  I’d hit forty and made that a cut-off point. My Linkedin profile summed it up – “Interested in things that are interesting”.

I learnt two more things. Don’t take a real assessment on the employment situation over Christmas. Get in people’s inboxes for the first Monday in January.

The other is you might think you are ready to go back out there, but are you actually match-fit? After the rollercoaster two decades of preparing and hosting a major breakfast show and all the other stuff, one half an hour meeting would kill me!

The time is right though and I’m delighted to re-appear. I have a whole new perspective on the world, and see my future as having seven or eight little jobs! A book here, a product there; a radio show or a bit of consultancy. And I’ll tell you – I’ll value every conversation going because I don’t want to watch Peppa Pig again.

And for the first time, I am really going to enjoy it. Not “working” per se has proved to be the defining moment in my life. Perspective has been achieved. It’s time to pop my head above the duvet once more, and then make the same mistakes all over again...