Six years ago, Lucy Kellaway’s life seemed “a model of affluent, enviable stability”, said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Telegraph. A respected columnist for the FT, where she’d worked for 32 years, she lived in a large house in Highbury with her husband and four children. But in the space of two years, she writes, “I tore it all down. House, marriage, job, considerable income – I despatched the lot of them.” She separated from her husband, moved into a cool but rickety modern house of her own, and became a schoolteacher. She also co-founded Now Teach, a charity to encourage other middle-aged professionals to take up teaching.
Why? She felt stale as a journalist, and wanted to do something useful; her mother had been a highly regarded teacher, which gave her some idea of what it would involve. What she didn’t realise was how relentlessly demanding it would be. When friends suggested meeting for coffee or lunch, she laughed. “What coffee? What lunch?”
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