I have been having an episode, a moment, a, dare I say it, midlife crisis? When I decided to take the leap of faith and do what I'd always wanted to do and went back to study cookery, I knew trying to get into hospitality would be hard. Actually it turned out to be harder than I thought.
There's been some bewilderment at why I would want to start at the bottom doing what one chef referred to, if I'd excuse his language, all the shit jobs.
Because I told him, I know that's where I need to start to get to where I want to be.
I can't be the first person who has made a complete career change later on in their life. Lots of people do it surely?
Work is, well, I like it, I do. But it has made me very restless and anti-social which has led me to be generally unhappy.
I've neglected a lot of things I loved to do, haven't gone out of the house anywhere much but to work. My rare days off seem to revolve around doing laundry and buying cat litter. And checking the job ads.
I've been compiling a list of my skills and past experience that relate to hospitality and looking at what I'm doing now, which is a kitchen job that's not a kitchen job.
If I'm not happy, the only way that's going to change is if I do something about it. No luck so far, but as the slogan goes, you've gotta be in it to win it.
I miss cooking, now that I've gone from consecutive days off to split days off, I don't do it as much. I'd usually shop one day. Running around the supermarket, Asian grocer and heath food stores and the next day, cook.
Despite that I have bought new cookbooks, I've even branched out into gluten free territory to try and teach myself something new. Fortunately cook books never expire, so they can all sit there waiting.
With the Lunar New year, maybe it's finally time I had a go at making dumplings. It's something that's been on my list of things to do for awhile.
I moved house, downsized on space, much of my life still feels to be in boxes. On the upside of the move, I had a long over due clear out. While it was nice to let some of it go, somethings were harder to let go of, letting go of parts of my life I wasn't really ready to let go of and it feels a little like defeat.
Like the current job search, I'm still hopeful, that I'll move again, into a bigger space, that I'll actually own and can renovate the kitchen - lots of work bench space!
Now I just wait and see what happens.
