Back to work
Tomorrow I start a new life. I am returning to full time work. How am I feeling about it, I ask myself? The answer comes back: tranquil. For the first time in my life, I have taken a step towards making a separation between life and work. Life will take place outside work. Life will be where my deepest ambitions are, where I keep the repository of my emotions, where my children and husband are. Work will be where I am driven, assertive, pro-active, determined, quick-witted, efficient, ruthless, and analytical. Work gets all that. I get a lunch break, to cycle into central London, and to be a working mother. Life gets the best of the rest. Life gets loving mummy (no stress because she cycled it out on the way home); life gets cooking, and reading, and gardening, and writing a blinding best-seller. And children's clothes, and ironing, and deciding which of my many travel, holiday, house extension projects and gadget purchases I will make in the next decade. For many years I viewed co