Guest Post: How did I get here? by Andrew Fenner

Preamble: it ain't necessarily so

Before going any further, there's something I'd like to say. One thing I have noticed in the course of my life is that most, if not all, of what I was taught from childhood onwards is misleading, if not actually wrong. The opposite is sometimes true.

Such implied maxims include:

·       "Work hard if you want to succeed". That's not necessarily true. What you have to do is work clever. Also, working (over) hard can be fatal: to quote James Thurber, "Early to rise and early to bed, make a man healthy, wealthy and dead."

·       "You need to conform to succeed". 

·       "You need to be sociable, fit in, etc. etc." (You can imagine the rest. If I could summarise them, I'd say, "Life is deadly serious")

I didn't set out to break these 'rules', I've just found that they don't always work, not for me anyway.

And now a plug: time and time again, I've recommended the book, "What Color is Your Parachute?" by a guy called Richard Nelson Bolles. His primary thesis is counter-intuitive: by trying to be like everyone else, you are de facto competing with everyone else; focus instead on being yourself as much as you can be, there aren't many people like you. He wrote this mainly for jobseekers, but ultimately it implies we should work for ourselves.

How I went freelance

It was May 1984. I was 35, half the Biblical lifespan of three score years and ten. I was sitting in our front room and I thought, "I've spent half my life doing what other people want me to do. I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do."

Notice that I didn't include anything about how I was going to do that. I'd actually been wanting to do it for the last six months. I'd been chronically sick with minor but persistent complaints such as colds, then in May it suddenly seemed the time was right. So I did it.

I felt strangely weightless. If you're 'in work', there's a certain logic: do this, get that. If you work for yourself, there's no such framework, there's no-one to tell you what to do. Then again, there's no-one to tell you what not to do.

I'd been thinking of using my languages for some time. I hadn't used them directly before, but I'd passed the Institute of Linguists Final Diploma examination in 1982. I'd even taught German at evening classes. I thought I was mad. I had no clients, no contacts, nothing, but it felt right.

I wrote to various agencies I found in the Yellow Pages. I had to support myself in the meantime, so I took up public survey work with what was then Ken Livingstone's GLC. This lasted over the summer, but then dried up. So I was faced with a dilemma: should I return to being employed, or should I persist in trying to be freelance?

(I have found from other people I have spoken to who went freelance that they found a similar phenomenon: the 'honeymoon period' when you are still 'in love' with being free tends to last about six months, but work won't necessarily have started coming in by then. You need to be prepared for this if it happens and not be frightened by it. You can get through it.)

(Another point to note is that it is better not to think of yourself in terms of what you do, but who you are. I may be lucky here: I've had three lives, living in Germany, printing and being freelance. The first thing you need to do before anything else is survive. The rest is academic.)

How did I get into law?

As work came in, I found that a lot of the documents I was being asked to translate (not surprisingly, perhaps) were legal, mainly contracts and disputes. I was appalled by the thought that I was translating these without any specialist knowledge or training; so I attended a Postgraduate Certificate in Law course in London for two years part time. It was hard work, but I really enjoyed it, and I've found since that I must have absorbed more than I thought. I've also attended a number of courses in French and German law and international law. I will never know as much as a practising solicitor, the German term 'angelernt' (often translated as 'semi-skilled', but seems more like 'learning in-process'), but I've worked with lawyers in this country and abroad and they seemed to accept what I do.

 


About Andrew (andrewjfenner@aol.com):

I was born in London, but only really came alive when I went to live in Germany. I came back and went to college but didn't like it. I didn't know what to do, ended up working in a factory and writing and self-publishing a short story which I'm proud to say was then 'discovered' and published properly as an adult literacy text ("George and the Bus"). That got me into printing, which I really enjoyed, and I stayed there for ten years, although I studied for and passed the Institute of Linguists' Final Diploma in 1982. (I also taught some German evening classes.) Then I decided I'd spent enough time working for other people, so I went freelance (in 1984), and I've been translating ever since. I've been interested in palaeontology (I found a Stone Age tool on a beach in Ireland), and I'm fascinated by how animals communicate, and whether we can communicate with them (non-verbally).