Re-educated: How I changed my job, my home, my husband and my hair

Lucy Kellaway’s FT Weekend Essay on Change

CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to desperately seeking wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for people who want to live a simpler, more fulfilled life, but aren't sure how to get there. A little while back, I hit the buffers. Outwardly, I had a successful life, but I wasn't happy. I couldn't see much point in anything. I rarely felt at peace and thought of life as a grind that I just had to get through. I realised I was far from alone, and wondered if there might be a different, better way.

So, for Desperately Seeking Wisdom, I've been talking to some wise people. People who've managed to change, or have had changed forced upon them. What was the wisdom that got them through it? What would they say that would help others who, like me, were struggling?

LUCY

I was bored with myself, really. Everything was just sort of same old, same old. If you have new experiences, which is what I've given myself through my, through my new job as a teacher, you don't change your, your personality and your character, but you change how you look at things, and that makes you much less boring to yourself because your responses to everything aren't the same. Once you start this business of change, subsequent changes are miles less scary.

CRAIG

Joining me today is Lucy Kellaway. Six years ago, when she was 57, Lucy quit her full-time job as a columnist at the Financial Times to become a trainee teacher. It was an experience she described as “brutal” but invigorating in her book, Re-educated. Her charity, Now Teach, encourages older professionals to step into the classroom and change their lives in the same way hers was transformed. I spoke to her during the school holidays…

LUCY

Well, I'm on holiday in Cornwall in the pouring rain, and I've just been to the Bude car boot sale, which I love so much that even though I got soaked to the skin, I still got a few bargains all for about 20p, which made me very happy indeed, so life is good.

CRAIG

And do you have to do loads of prep for a new term because you're still relatively - and you're going to a new school and you're still relatively new as a teacher?

LUCY

Yeah, I mean, I generally feel militant about it, I think holidays should be holidays. But this year, because I'm going to be teaching economics A Level for the first time, I've been immersing myself in A Level economics textbooks, and I find - I don't know if I should be ashamed of this or proud - I've been absolutely loving them. Um, I haven't really looked at my marginal revenue product curve since I was at university, and, um, yeah, I've been making a lot of very nerdy notes.

CRAIG

That clearly excites you. How long ago was it, you had that kind of excitement when you were a journalist?

LUCY

Well, it's a different sort of excitement. I mean, you know, as you know, there's a sort of rush of being a journalist, and there's the rush of - some of it's quite unhealthy rush, there's the rush of approval, and my God, I was addicted to that. That, you know, if you've written something that's going well, and you're getting all of those sort of hits and comments, and that very briefly makes you feel fantastic but then you think, ‘Oh, give me more, give me more’. So it doesn't leave you in a particularly good place, but I didn't get the same thrill from the subject matter ‘cos I was making it all up as I went along. I was a columnist and that's what you do.

CRAIG

So let's rewind back to 2017. You left a comfortable and prestigious job at The Financial Times, you left a husband of 25 years who you’d had four children with. You moved house, you trained to be a teacher, and you stopped dyeing your hair. That's an awful lot of change by any measure. What was behind it all?

LUCY

Look, I don't think there was a single thing behind it all. I've made it - in writing a book, I've made it look as if it was all part of the same story, but each of those changes, the decisions were completely different and I could have given you a very rational explanation, separate explanation, for why they all made sense. But I do remember back then in 2017, I'd written this column on The FT telling everyone that I was retraining to be a teacher and trying to get them to come with me to, um, through this charity Now Teach, that I'd set up, saying, ‘This makes sense for me. I'm sure it makes sense for you too. How about it?’

And in response to that, um, Gaby Hinsliff on The Guardian wrote a column saying, ‘You know, we all want change in our 50s. Um, we all dream of doing different things, but most of us kind of don't go through with it and maybe the reason that Lucy Kellaway has gone through with it is that she has just divorced her husband’. Um, and I read this and sort of slightly thought, ‘Bloody journalists, why do they always get their facts wrong?’

I wasn't actually divorced; I was merely separated, and in any case, how dare she think that she knew my motivation? I’d never even met her. So I was very sort of humph about that, but I guess I've been thinking about it subsequently, and, and I think that in a way she's right. If you like me had led the most stable life possible, all change is quite frightening, and so when you do start to change some of it, you realise that there's a good side to change too, and maybe the rest of it is fine, and that you can do all of it, including your hair, and it's all fine.

CRAIG

Do people look at you, it sounds, er, Gaby Hinsliff certainly did, with the little bit of suspicion. They thought you're in your late 50s, it's a bit odd, is this maybe a cry for help? Is like, boredom? Is it, you know, God knows what, but not actually just the straightforward motivation of wanting to do something fascinating and different?

LUCY

Yeah, well, I don't know. I shan't speak for her as I haven't met her, I don't know what the hell she was actually thinking, but as far as other people went, when I told them what I was doing, I mean, I think it's been very polarising that quite a lot of people say, ‘Hey, you know, take me with you’. Um, but I feel really stuck and really ready to do something different, and I - and, and quite a lot of other people I think just think you're completely mad.

What are you doing? Your life seemed great to me. Why, you know, if it's not broken, don’t f- you know, all of that. And then there was another group of people who I think were quite hostile and I wonder if it's not being too psychobabbly to say that it was making them examine the stuck-ness of their own lives and feel very uncomfortable about that. So I think that there may, with some people, there may have been something like that going on, and them thinking, ‘Christ’.

CRAIG

I, I was gonna say, did some people presumably - saw it almost as a challenge to them?

LUCY

Yeah, I think so, ‘cos if I'm saying, especially some of the other journalists, if I'm saying, ‘Ugh! Had it with journalism’, and the, the sort of implication, you know, ‘It’s so shallow, I don't really need any of that anymore, I wanna go do something useful’. That is sort of - it could be taken implicitly as a kind of judgement on the people who are still doing it after all these years.

CRAIG

Reading the book, it sounds like you'd had the idea floating around for something like 10 years. Why didn't it happen closer to the beginning of the idea? What - were you stuck?

LUCY

Yeah, isn’t that interesting? So the idea came to me out of the blue in my late 40s, when my mum died very, very suddenly. She was alive and energetic one minute and dead the next, and, er, yeah, I was absolutely knocked over by that, and I remember thinking, you know, then my, my job was great and I was doing miles better than I’d ever thought possible.

But I just thought, ‘Actually, I want to be a teacher’, which is what my mum had been. And I remember then looking up PGCE courses and thinking, ‘Damn, it's too late’. I looked at all these pictures of kind of 22-year-old, um, trainee teachers and I thought f- you know, er, none of those look like me, and - but th- but I think it wasn't just that; it was that I wasn't ready to change then.

There were still too many things that were holding me into, into journalism. I mean, I, I still loved it, I guess but there were other things, too. I, I felt I needed that status that I got from it. I mean, if you had asked me that at the time, I would have definitely denied it, but that seems to be true to me now. That, you know, to say to people, ‘Ooh, I'm a columnist on The FT’, they look at you very differently, and I felt I needed that then.

And 10 years later, when my dad died and I again thought, ‘Gosh, maybe I need to do this teaching thing now’, I looked at the, the same pictures of the 22-year-olds and I didn't think, ‘Oh my God, I've left it too late’. I thought, ‘Right, now the time’s, er, this is the time for me. I’m, I'm leaving much less at The FT and I wanna do it now’.

CRAIG

And how do people look at you, when you tell them you're a teacher?

LUCY

What I'm learning to say, is just to say, ‘I'm a teacher’. So there are two ways that I can answer that. Firstly, what do you do, I can either say, ‘Oh, I, I'm a teacher’, and then they don't go, ‘Ooh’ you know, so you don't get the sort of r-response, but if I say, ‘Oh, I'm a very inexperienced teacher because I'm just training to be one, after a very, very long career as a journalist’, then they're immediately interested, because that's such an unusual thing to do.

But I'm deciding to go absolutely cold turkey on response and not give them any of that. I just say, ‘Oh, I'm a teacher’, and some say, ‘Oh, you know, primary or secondary?’ and I say secondary and then the conversation tends to end there.

CRAIG

So a lot of people get stuck, um, you were saying over status. Some people it might be over money, others just, you know, some other block that's going on, that they might be on autopilot in their lives or whatever, not properly in control. Having been through what you've been through, what advice would you give them?

LUCY

Yeah, I’m, I'm sure I'm meant to say, ‘My advice should be go on, just do it’ but actually, I think it's much more complicated than that. Some people are stuck for good reasons. I mean, if you absolutely need the money of the job that you're doing, then leaving and doing something else is very difficult. The status argument was sort of less of a big deal. Actually, bigger ones are about, your job might suit you in some way.

So that - The FT was - I had four little kids, not so little now. I had an old father, aged father who I was trying to look after. Um, so in trying to make my whole life work, it suited me well, doing a job that I was stale in ‘cos there were all these other things that I was trying to do. So I guess, you know, this is a long-winded way of saying things are complicated and life is very long.

If you're stuck now, it doesn't mean you're going to be stuck tomorrow. And don't catastrophise about being stuck. You know, it's fine to go on doing a job that you're a bit bored with for another couple of years if you need to do that for money, or, um, you know, family responsibilities, or whatever your reason is. Um, and to remember that working life goes on practically forever, so you might need to be slightly fed up for another couple of years in order to break free when the time's right for you.

CRAIG

You seem, reading the book, to have been falling out of love with journalism for a bit. Is that right?

LUCY

Yes, it is right. I mean, I did do it for an awfully long time. So, I was at The FT for 32 years, so I think I'm allowed to be a bit out of love with it at the end of that. And also, the sort of journalism I was doing, I wasn't going off and uncovering hugely important sort of misdemeanours in the corporate world, I was really just having a laugh.

So I wrote a column that was taking the piss out of corporate life. Um, that was my mainstay. I did quite a few interviews and other things, too. Um, and actually, one of the beauties of corporate life is it's so ridiculous that you never run out of material. But it's true, I had run out of enthusiasm. And I think partly, it's just that 32 years was too long, but I also think our motivation changes as we get older.

And, you know, I went into it in the first place because the most glamorous, clever and amusing people I knew were journalists, and I wanted to be like them. But that sort of slightly shallow charm really, really does fail and, um, fade and I, I just wanted to do something that was a bit more useful, I guess. And it didn't seem to me that writing columns, taking the piss out of corporate jargon, though faintly amusing, was particularly useful.

CRAIG

Interestingly, subsequently you've sort of looked back and said, you know, how it, how - it's funny, and it's accurate, and you're sort of satirising something that des- definitely needs satirising, but you worried a little bit about whether or not you were always nice.

LUCY

Yeah. Er, that was particularly when I interviewed people. I, I just wonder about some of those interviews that I did. I always thought, you know, if you give someone enough rope, they'll hang themselves, which of course they do. And I would just sort of wait until people started saying really sort of grim, vain things, were showing they had no self-knowledge, and then quote them verbatim.

It was kind of funny, and I had a knack of doing it, but I, I have slight twinges to my conscience and also on the columns, I used to tear innocent managers limb from limb on the strength of really ghastly sort of email, motivational emails that they sent to the team. And you could say, well, you know, lessons were being learnt by the corporate world in general, but actually, they never learnt anything. And those individual managers, was it fair to demolish them in quite such a merciless way? I just have vague unease.

CRAIG

It's, to be fair to you, there is a very rich vein of bullshit in that kind of communication. Why do you think that is?

LUCY

I think quite a lot of it is about inadequacy. I think here a lot of people who don't really know what the hell it is, they’re s- you know, they've got this important job and if they just say words in one syllable, it sort of doesn't sound important enough, it doesn't sound clever enough. Um, and I - a lot of it is from that, but then it's simply that language spreads. So as soon as you've got one person round the table, sort of taking a deep dive, the whole bloody table’s taking deep dives.

CRAIG

I want to push a little bit harder on the, you know, society often putting blocks on people trying to change, and I was really interested at the time when you were talking about thinking of teaching, that kind of thing, you describe your relationship with your husband as one of mutual neglect, and it sounds like the relationship had run its course, but you sensed people thought it was a good thing to keep going, or it was a sign of a succen- successful person that they kept a relationship going, and perhaps it was a failure to let go. Did you feel that?

LUCY

Actually, it wasn't people in general, it was two people specifically, vis my mum and my dad. So I'd been brought up with this very, very strong sense that you can do what you like until you have children, but once you have children, you must keep your marriage together, because you owe it to your children, and that was a very, very strong moral imperative that I've known, always.

And it really hadn't occurred to me that splitting up was something that I was ever going to do, and, um, do I r- do I think that my mum and dad were wrong? Um… possibly, but I absolutely understood it too, that what they were saying is your children must be your priority, and I completely sign up to that.

So, er, looking at it now, though, and this is probably the most self-serving thing anybody will say to you, but I don't actually - the societal thing is that I don't think my marriage was a failure. Weirdly, I think it was a success, um, that we were together for 25 years, and I think I married the right person. I hope he did, too.

Er, we like each other and we’re friends now, but we've both changed sufficiently not to y- to wish to be shackled to each other, and I think that's really, really common, and sometimes when my friends come and have supper with me in my house that I live in on my own, I, I sometimes sense they look at me with some envy and think how much nicer and freer their lives would be now, now that their children are grown up, if they could maybe do the same thing.

CRAIG

Yeah, I've been, I've been reading quite a lot around people feeling that they have to do things, or having patterns or things that are put in their life that they feel they have to stick by, and actually a lot of the advice is, look, sometimes things are good for a while and they just naturally end, and the thing is to not try and cling on or artificially keep things going, whether it's a marriage or a career or, or any number of things. But actually, there's often quite a lot of pain when you're trying to cling to something that has naturally come to an end.

LUCY

Mm. I - yes, there's pain in clinging, but there is pain and letting go too. So that it's, it, there's a bit of pain all, all around, but once you're out the other side, it is really, really great and I don't - actually I don't wish that David and I had, had separated earlier. I don't wish that I'd left The FT earlier.

This is what we sort of touched on very briefly. I mean, I'm 62 now, and I feel so different to what I expected 62 to feel - I mean, I think I thought I'd be practically dead when I was 62, but I feel that there is so much more time for all sorts of things, for either new relationships, for new careers, for new - and once you have that perspective of interesting, fulfilling, full life, not stopping around 60 but maybe going on to about 80. you're, you're in much less of a hurry, and your, your - yeah, your sense of perspective really changes.

CRAIG

This is the first time we've ever actually spoken, and you sound incredibly energised and upbeat and up for life. Would I have found that before you changed career when, you know, in your early 50s would have found the same person?

LUCY

Oh God, that's very hard to say ‘cos we're all such terrible judges of ourselves, aren't we? I - I'm very energetic generally. so even though I'm supposedly on holiday, I've been doing about a million energetic things today, and I like my life to be very full. No, I don't think you would, but I am maybe more full of sort of positive energy.

CRAIG

‘Cos you say, ‘I didn't change career to become a better person, I changed career because I was not only fed up with my job, but fed up with myself’. [Yeah] What did you want to change about yourself?

LUCY

[GASPS] I, I think I was sort of - yeah - er, gosh. You put me on the spot there. I think I was just sort of bored. I was bored with myself, really. Er, you know, everything was just sort of same old, same old. If you have new experiences, which is what I've given myself through my, through my new job as a teacher, you don't change your, your personality and your character, but you change how you look at things, and that makes you much less boring to yourself because your responses to everything aren't the same. Yeah, so that's been really great.

CRAIG

So you're not in a rut?

LUCY

No, I'm absolutely the opposite. I mean, like, you know, I was in a complete rut at The FT. I’m now in the opposite of a rut, and the - one thing that's so strange is that once you start this business of change, subsequent changes are miles less scary. So in September, I've, I’ve left the academy school group that I've been with for four years, and I'm starting another new job.

But this time, it's not an earth shattering, oh, my goodness, you know, the thing of, of 32 years. It’s just heigh ho, um, I've learnt all I can at that school, now I'm going to a new one, and that feels really, so effortless and flexible, and exciting. Yeah. So that's - so no, I could not be further from a rut.

CRAIG

Because when, er, reading the book, um, each moment where there's a sort of big change, like you're getting divorced, or you're becoming a teacher, or leaving, er, or leaving The FT, that kind of thing, um, I notice that, that you say that there's this moment where you realise it's actually happening, and you burst into tears and cry, ad then quite quickly afterwards, you're fine and move on. What do you think was going on there, do you think?

LUCY

Yeah, isn't that so weird? Er, [LAUGHS] that both times were sort of ridiculous, ‘cos these weren't changes that came out of the blue, so when I was, um, you know, left the family house and we sold it, you know, that whole process took six months or something, but it literally wasn't until my last, you know, stick of furniture being carried out of the house, that I suddenly thought,’ Oh, my God, this is it. This is the end of my family. It's the end of this whole passage in my life’.

And I sat down on the front steps and wept. I mean, that was pretty weird, but yeah, then as you say, it was as if I needed to have that very powerful response, but then I got into the car and drove off to my new house and was very excited 20 minutes later, by the time I arrived there, um, which is a bit fickle.

Similarly, and even more ridiculously, the whole becoming a teacher thing, because I had set up this charity to encourage other people to become teachers too, called Now Teach. so I was going to put a -do a lot of media around that and I was doing this big column, saying, ‘I'm leaving, come with me’.

And I was scooped on my own news story by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian, who wrote this story that I was just standing at home on a Sunday and I saw, ‘Lucy Kellaway to leave Financial Times to become a teacher’, and that, I had another of those moments when I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my God, I'm leaving The FT. There's no turning back. This is the moment’.

And, and I found myself weeping then too. Um, I'm actually not a woman who does very much weeping at all, so both moments were really quite extreme. But as you say, yeah, they were just like sudden plunges off a cliff, but I managed to sort of hit the, hit ground, get up and, and, and walk off again perfectly happily.

CRAIG

Yeah, and I, I totally get it because I think there's almost a moment of mourning, even - even though you want to change and you want to move on, and you want to go and do something else, there is a -you know, it's very human, I think, to mourn something that has just been part of the fabric of your life.

LUCY

Yeah, I was losing so much in both cases. I mean, you know, The FT is an amazing newspaper, it was an amazing place to work. Equally, you know, that life that I had with David and the children in that family house in Islington will probably be the happiest and most important part of my adult life. So, so saying goodbye to both, I - they both deserved my tears, absolutely.

CRAIG

I want to dive in properly to your experiences as a teacher in a moment, just, but just a couple of questions more to sort of set the scene really, at the moment. I was struck by the fact of how strong your relationship with your parents was, and your mother particularly. Um, she told you never to accept compliments. Was that a good or a bad thing?

LUCY

Oh God. I suspect like, it was both really. It means that you're not - you know, she thought everything was try- everyone was trying to flatter and suck up. Actually, as a columnist, it was important because people do try and flatter and, and, and suck up. They also try and drag you down, but you need to be a bit sceptical about both. I, I think it makes you quite hard to reach too. I think there's a sort of toughening that it does, but it was so ingrained, even though I don't recognise it as altogether a good thing, I’m, I'm jolly well sticking to it, ‘cos that's just how I am.

CRAIG

But I suppose behind it is the assumption that the compliment is necessarily not true, which seems, there's something about - do you see what I mean? It's almost as if she's saying, well, people are just trying to flatter, but actually, we, we talked to, or I talked to, um, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry last week, and he was trying to say that if you actually try and engage with the world as positive and radiate positivity, then you'll find that radiates back, and actually, it's a - that's a good thing, but maybe I'm overemphasising.

LUCY

Um, well, yeah. I mean, Mum was the most positive person on earth, and I'm quite a positive person, so I don't think it's quite about being positive or negative. I think it's more that if you had begun this chat, which I must say you failed to do, by saying, ‘Lucy, I've just finished your book. Completely amazing. I loved every word’. Had you begun like that, which as I say, regrettably you didn't, I would have -

CRAIG

I’m taking that as read. I -

LUCY

I would have just thought, ‘Yeah, yeah’. I would have… I wouldn't have thought, ‘This charming man loves my book. Aren’t I marvellous, aren't I a fantastic writer?’ I would have absolutely dismissed it, and, and appropriate to do so in those circs.

You know, if I said to my mum - maybe it's about what is a compliment? If I said something to my mum that was nice and that was praising her in some way, she wouldn't shrug me off. She would absolutely accept that and be pleased. I think that it was in the nature of what she believed a compliment to be. Um, you don’t exactly comp- you know, the, that it’s, it’s, it’s a production. You are going out of your way to praise someone.

Possibly you don't know them very well. Er, that it's, it's more about you than the person who you're complimenting, maybe it's something like that. But yeah, I, I, I mean, I d- I do definitely believe that we need to go through the world, not being entirely positive and Pollyanna-ish, um, but a bit of accentuate the positive isn't a bad thing.

CRAIG

For the record, I have finished your book and I did really enjoy it and highly recommend it, which is one of the reasons why I've been talking to you. But moving on, um, one of the key - one of the key ingredients I suspect of change, er, and, and the wisdom you get from it is, is humility. How do you think your transition from journalism to teaching went, and what did it teach you? Was it as you expected it?

LUCY

Well, everybody said, ‘This is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done’, and particularly teachers said that to me, and they said it so often that I just kind of thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, um, I've done lots of hard things’ and in my heart of hearts, I thought I was going to be a brilliant teacher because Mum was absolutely fantastic English teacher at the school I used to go to.

My daughter was by then about four years in as a teacher, doing sensationally well, so I thought these things run in families. Look, you know, I love talking, I'm really interested in kids. What could possibly go wrong? What went wrong was practically everything. It was profoundly shocking.

Er, just, just how bad I was. The first lesson, you have a mentor who sits at the back taking notes. I remember, you know, the sort of jargon of teaching, you have your WWW, What Went Well column, and then not what went badly, your Even Better If, your EBI column, and I could see that there was one thing on the What Went Well column, which was she said I had great presence.

The EBI column ran to a couple of sides, and there were all sorts of things like, you know, Bilal wasn't listening. You know, Joseph was, you know, looking out of the window. You made three mistakes on the board, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, everything was wrong. It was so difficult. I couldn't manage the technology at all, and I didn't actually know what teaching was.

CRAIG

I was just gonna say, was it tough getting that feedback? ‘Cos I imagine as you'd had almost universal praise in the later stages of your career as a journalist, was it tough suddenly getting feedback that was, was hard?

LUCY

Er, no, I don't think it was the feedback that was hard. You know, I was really aware that the lesson was going very, very poorly, or parts of it were, and I was desperate for anything that would help me get better. So when you have humiliated yourself in front of 32 kids, having your mentor point out that you've done a few things badly, that's kind of the least of it.

Er, there, there were a couple of occasions in that first year, though, when I did slightly look back, thinking about subs on The FT, sort of sending me a very polite email saying, ‘Would it be okay if we changed one comma in your column?’ and contrasting that with being told that absolutely everything was wrong, and I was gonna have to change this, do this differently, do that differently. Yeah, so it was definitely hard but by the time you've started, the most important thing is to get better, and anything that's gonna help you on that, boy, very popular.

CRAIG

I'm really interested in this idea of unlearning, as you call it. Tell us what you mean by that term.

LUCY

Yeah, you know, I thought that the hard thing was going to be to learn new things. I think it's absolute rubbish, by the way, that older people find it hard learning new things. I've never learnt so much so quickly, because I've absolutely had to. The much harder thing is sort of unlearning old habits, and some of the people who have joined, um, my scheme, Now Teach, particularly I've noticed it among the very, very successful corporate males, um, a couple, both of them City solicitors, they were plunged into the classroom, had similar experiences to me.

But they had importance, self-importance as part of their personas and found very, very quickly that if you go into the staff room and you start telling people that, you know, ‘You shouldn't run things like this’, and ‘Why is this done like that?’ and expecting to be listened to as a very important person, that's not going to work.

And, and, and having to unlearn importance - I mean, I also had to do it, in that, you know, people would say to me, ‘Oh, you know, do your, um, students know you're famous?’ And I’d think, er, I’d - you know, didn't really know how to answer that because to my students, I wasn't famous because they hadn't heard of The FT.

Er, they just, it was so far outside their experience, they could not have cared less, so any idea that I was an important person, I just had to drop immediately. Immediately. I wasn't important, I was old and quite weird.

CRAIG

It seems there are patterns professionally that you need to unlearn, but also, personally in terms of psychology and emotions too. Do you agree with that?

LUCY

Yeah, completely. So, some of the social patterns, if you go from something with a lot of freedom, like journalism, to something with none, like teaching, you have to unlearn the idea that you can go off and have a cup of coffee with someone whenever you feel like it. So there's that, but there's also the patterns of how you learn and how you behave.

And some of this I'm really up against, so I have a long seating thing about sort of general chaos. So a- and a part of that's a personality trait but I've learnt that the sort of chaos, a very messy desk is fine if you're a columnist, it's useful if you're a columnist, because ideas sort of surf- you know, they sort of surface from the pile somehow. It's a catastrophe if you're a teacher. So I'm trying to unlearn my kind of chaotic thing and, and, and, and establish something that's much more orderly. Four years in, I'm still finding that hard.

CRAIG

I'm just imagining you walking into the school, you know, you're, you're 57. Um, you know, you're training to be a teacher. How did your fellow teachers and the pupils treat you? What did they think of you?

LUCY

Well, with the pupils, it's very hard to know, because I have been teaching in one of these super, super strict schools. They can't say boo to a goose. But I think they thought I was very funny in my inability to use the technology. Somebody said, I said, ‘Well, they think I'm ancient’, and a much younger teacher said, ‘No, they won't even notice because they think all grownups are ancient’.

Anyway, this was massively disproved one day, um, when I had done a little sum with some - I was teaching maths at first with some kids, and said, you know, put their names in it and said, you know, ‘So and so is 12. You know, Jaheim is 12. I'm five times Jaheim’s age, how old am I?’ Um, one of the kids just skipped the calculation, put up his hand and went, ‘Er, 85?’

So they do think that I'm incredibly old, and - but not necessarily in a bad way. So I think, I like to think, maybe I'm deluding myself, that, that the kids think I'm hilarious and are fond of me, sort of way, because I am very, very different to their other teachers.

I think they love the fact that in a very strict school, I just, I was perfectly happy to break the rules myself. So I think they thought I was a bit of a sort of badass, which I quite enjoy too. As far as the teachers were -

CRAIG

Yeah, ‘cos some of the - some of the teachers must have been a good 30 years younger than you and actually have more experience of this field than you. What did they make of you?

LUCY

Yeah, they were all at least 30 years younger than me, um, some more than that, and much more experienced. I think that at first, they were quite suspicious. There was one guy in one school I trained in, he, when he heard that he was going to be mentoring somebody who was 58, he thought ‘Christ!’. Then he Googled me, and he just thought, ‘This is not going to work. There was no way this is going to work’.

So he started off very, very hostile and I think he - when he saw how bad my first lesson was, he was even more aghast, but we ended up absolutely the best of friends and I think the key to turning that round was me saying, ‘What I used to do is irrelevant. I'm trying to do what you're doing brilliantly, and I need your help’.

And I think they really liked that, and also when I started writing about teaching with such enthusiasm, and making it very, very clear how much I had to learn, and that I'd voluntarily given up something that was supposedly more glamorous, to do - to try and be good at what they were doing. I think they've loved that because it makes them feel better about what they do.

So actually, one of the most fantastic things about this is my relationship, well, it’s my relationships both with the students and with the other teachers. It’s so nice. At my 60th birthday party, a lot of my friends were the same age as my children's friends. That just felt really nice.

CRAIG

You tell the story of using the phrase, ‘whiter than white’ in the classroom, and there being a sharp intake of breath from the pupils. What did that feel like?

LUCY

That was just yet another thing that made me think, ‘I am floundering around. I am this old dinosaur who does not have a clue’. Um, it had not, literally had not occurred to me that this was going to be an unfortunate thing to say until it was out of my mouth and I looked at the faces of the students, and I guess that particular class was maybe 15 percent white, something like that, 85 percent non-white.

And some of the students just looked at me in complete horror, and I did think, ‘Oh, God, right. Okay. Um, do I stop the class now and say, er, “Look, that was not intended to be a racist remark. It's an old fashioned thing to say. I think it comes from a soap advertisement”. Um, you know, should we talk about this?’ And then I thought, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna make this worse’.

So I just ploughed on, um, and just thought, ‘I'm never going to say that again’. But so I'm learning in all of those ways. I'm learning, and you know, the whole question of race at school is very interesting and, yeah, I'm very aware that, um, yeah, I've got masses to learn about it.

CRAIG

So I, I think that's really interesting, because, you know, being sensitive in that way, because I think you and I probably know a lot of journalistic characters who'd get very shirty and start lecturing about how people were being ridiculous about that, but actually understanding the sensitivity is the really important point there.

LUCY

Yeah, completely, and I think, you know, racism v- even before the BLM Movement, this did - this happen before that, um, if - you know, for the first time in my life, I'm in a racial minority and I… nee- I, I don't at all think that I'm guilty until proven innocent, but I think I need to win the trust of my students.

I need to try and understand their lives and understand what they think. I need to understand why they may think that some people who have taught them are racist. What have, what have those teachers done to make them feel way? Er, you know, I just, I just need to, I, I need more information on this and ones who do feel offended by things that I've said, I need to discuss it with them. Privately, not, not with the whole blinking class.

CRAIG

You confront the fact that people think only the privileged can make dramatic changes, like the ones that you did. In other words, some people think you could afford to do it while others couldn't. Um, do you think at all that when they make that point, it's a fair challenge, or do you actually think that people can change and., um, in different ways and it's not really about the money, it's more, there's more deep seated things that are going on there?

LUCY

Look, the money makes it miles, miles easier. It makes it all easier. It was much easier for me and David to separate because we could both afford to have places to live separately. So if we couldn't have afforded that, I suspect we would still, we might still be together, I don't know.

Um, equally, because I had savings, I had a pension, it was very, you know, to take a whatever it was, an 80 percent pay cut, was something that I, I was able to do, so it made it easier. But, um, I, I don't think that it's true that if you're not quite as privileged, that's bad luck, then you can't change your life.

You can, it's just harder. I mean, some of the people who have come through Now Teach, there was one guy who borrowed a lot of money to become a teacher. Someone else, um, sold his house so that he could do it. Um, you know, people have taken financial, um, sacrifices in order to do it, and have not regretted it because the boost that they've got from doing something so different and so worthwhile is really phenomenal.

CRAIG

In the book, you're very honest and open about, you know, trying dating again. Did it affect your dating experiences, do you think?

LUCY

Well, dating is really quite hard if, for a woman, if you are in your 50s, um, and this is another really - this is another thing about ageing that I'd really like to change. Why do we think it's so much better to be young? You know, I always wince when people sort of say, ‘Oh, has this change of life made you feel much younger?’ And I always seem sort of very snappy. I say, ‘No it has not’.

Um, but it's made me feel that being my age is a good thing to be. It's an, it's a, it's a nice age to be. So I absolutely loathe the men on their dating profiles whose, you know, you can see them, they're kind of grey, bald, paunchy, utterly unattractive looking men of my age who say that their target range is sort of 40 to 50, and there are loads and loads and loads of them.

But actually, in the end, I think it's sort of self-selecting. I think that somebody who would not be interested in me because my hair is grey is not gonna be someone who I'm gonna be interested in anyway. So I think it was hard enough -no, and, and the answer is no, it's fine. It's fine.

CRAIG

But there is - but it's interesting, isn't it, because there is - there, there is this massive industry in pretending we don't get older, and it is a huge deal to, you know, men and women, um, the pretending that somehow that they aren’t ageing. Um, and you pose the question like, ‘Why?’ What is that? Is that people that are afraid of looking weak, or thinking that it's just you're getting too near death and there's a problem with that? What, what is it?

LUCY

I, I, I really don't know and, and I think it's a sort of quite an Anglo Saxon thing. I think that there are societies in Africa and Asia where this is much less true, where sort of older people are really sort of revered and valued for, for what they are. I don't know, is some of it to do with… I mean, I think a lot of it is to do with sort of beauty and sexuality.

There's all of that, but I think it's also there's probably something to do with sort of, you know, death and, um, it's all quite dark stuff, but I really, really want to be a poster child for looking one's age and actually, um, the, the, the book has been optioned by a, I don't actually know if this is all top secret, but by a telly company, and I hope they're going to turn it into a sitcom. That's what they're trying to do.

And I've said, ‘I don't mind if I end up looking an absolutely ghastly nightmare’. There are only two things that - they can do whatever they like with my character, ‘cos they're going to fictionalise it - I said that, that, that there are only two things that I really, really care about.

The first is that they must not make it look like a silly thing for somebody my age to want to become a teacher, because I really want to encourage other people to do that. The other thing, they must not have somebody glamorous-looking playing me, and particularly they mustn't have somebody who looks young - you know, they, they mustn't have one of the sort of, you know, kind of Kate Winslet, ‘cos it's always such a cop out when, um, TV starts trying to do people in their 60s and they're trying to say, ‘Yeah, you can be in your 60s but you can be beautiful and sexy too’.

I really want to ha- be shown, I want to be played by somebody who looks like an ordinary 62-year-old. Um, I don't know if telly’s up to commissioning that, if they've got that far, but if they do, whoa! That would, I’d be so happy.

CRAIG

So you took the leap in terms of your job, your home, your husband and your hair. Can you imagine how you would be if you hadn't taken that leap?

LUCY

I'd be okay. I would be okay, but I would be stultified, I think. I would be squabbling and resentful with David, which isn't great. We'd be fine, you know, we'd be sort of limping along, but really not great. I would be increasingly frustrated with The FT and anxious about my own performance, and thinking of myself as a sort of has been who really couldn't do it very well anymore and that would be very stressful. So, I think it's always dangerous talking about happiness, because happiness is so sort of fragile, but I think it's really safe to say I would be a lot, lot less happy than I am now, but I would be soldiering on.

CRAIG

We're coming to the end, um, of our chat and the one thing I always ask people at the end is, if you could share only one piece of wisdom after everything you've been through, what would it be? What would yours be?

LUCY

Life is really long. There isn't a hurry to do anything, so if you haven't been successful by this point, it doesn't matter. If you don't enjoy what you do, it doesn't matter. If your relationships aren't working out, well, obviously that's not great and maybe you can fix them, but my message is that there's time to do other things. And you - there's not a wild dash, and simply realising that, I think just allows us all to breathe again.

CRAIG

Many thanks to Lucy Kellaway. Her book, Re-educated, is published by Ebury Press. Please like and subscribe to this podcast and tell people about it. You can also visit our website: desperatelyseekingwisdom.com. Our next guest is Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer for Google X. His world was turned upside when his son died after a doctor made a basic error during surgery. Mo talks about his devastation and how he made life worth living again. I’m Craig Oliver and this is a Creators Inc Production.