On curtains, career change and a dog's dinner

What I've learnt about freelancing (and fabrics)

The sitting room (and curtains) at Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex, where I too could have produced literary and artistic masterpieces. Photo: Elizabeth Whiting, Alamy

I’ve been thinking a lot about curtains. I’m embarrassed, in fact, to think about the time and energy I’ve spent on curtains. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours Googling fabrics and patterns and brands. I am now the world expert on curtain fabric and I’m ready to present my findings. They are: that there are hardly any I like.

This is the second time in five years that I’ve devoted huge chunks of effort to curtains. The last time was when we moved to the thatched cottage in the countryside we recently left. After weeks of research, I found the perfect fabric. It was from a range called “Bloomsbury”, with fabrics called things like “Charleston”, “Quentin” and “Berwick trail”. It reignited some of my youthful fantasies. I too would be part of an intellectual and artistic group that changed people’s taste in literature, art and interior design! I too would write literary masterpieces and hobnob with some of the key thinkers of our time! Unfortunately, a virus arrived soon after the curtains, which hobbled hobnobbing for quite a while.

I took the curtains when we left. I couldn’t bear to leave them. They don’t fit the new windows. Of course they don’t fit the new windows. And whatever company bought the company who made the fabric decided to discontinue the only fabric range in the world I liked.

So, it was back to square one.

To cut a long story short, I found some fabric I liked on Etsy. It took a long time to arrive. It took even longer to get it to the curtain maker. Every time I took the (extremely heavy) parcels to the local parcel shop, the electronic zapper produced a message saying something along the lines of “not a hope in hell”. When I switched to the options that offered pick up from home, I had a succession of cards saying that the couriers were sorry to have missed me. But not as sorry as I was, since I’d been waiting inside like a coiled spring.

Two weeks after I finally managed to get the fabric delivered, I got a message from the curtain makers to say there was a problem. The fabric, it turned out, was riddled with faults. The pattern “runs across the fabric instead of down”, I was told, and “it is out of square”. There was a photo attached of one of the other fabrics with an entire area that was threadbare. Did I, said the curtain maker, want to choose some other fabrics?

Did I, in other words, want to write off several hundred pounds I was extremely unlikely to be refunded and start from scratch? Or did I want to spend several hundred pounds more on turning duff fabric into a dog’s dinner?

It was Patterson’s, I mean Hobson’s, choice.

It reminded me of the choice I faced when I was made redundant from The Independent. On the day I discovered that my contract for a column had been kyboshed by a man twenty years younger than me, that choice became all too clear. Did I want to leave the paper with a tiny (insultingly tiny) contract to write odds and sods on the arts pages, instead of the twice-weekly column and “Christina Patterson interview” I’d been writing for a very good salary? Or did I want to leave with nothing?

Perhaps a more sensible person would have made a different decision. They might have mulled it over and thought: you know what? This is insulting, but some work is better than no work, even if it looks to the reader as if you’ve suddenly gone from CEO to intern.

A sensible person might well have done, but I didn’t. I marched into the editor’s office and told him I didn’t like the way he was treating the senior women on his staff. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. I shouted that I did. He threatened to call security. And that was that. When I walked out of the office, for the last time after ten years, nobody even looked up.

You try being calm when you’ve just been told it’s curtains on everything you’ve built up.

A few months ago, I reviewed a book called Revolting Women, by a leadership coach called Lucy Ryan. When she set out to do the PhD that would turn into the book, she was told that it would be “unpublishable”.  There was, she was told, “very little literature” about middle-aged professional women and not much of an audience for it. When she finally did find someone prepared to supervise her research, she had a surprise. She discovered that middle-aged women weren’t deserting the workplace because they had run out of steam. What they wanted was to gear up and step up. But they weren’t getting the chance because their male bosses seemed to have a vested interest in keeping them down.

Well, tell me something new. When I was told by the editor that he wanted to “freshen the pages up”, I didn’t realise that that would mean keeping all the older male columnists and just getting rid of me. Men, it seemed, were always “fresh”, but women in their late forties were not. There has, says Ryan, been a 67 per cent increase in women over 55 opening business accounts. This is not because women are more entrepreneurial than men. It’s because many women discover that if they want to have or keep a job, they’re going to have to create it.

Anyone who has been there will know that the path from employment to successful business owner or freelancer is rarely smooth. Winkling money out of someone else’s bank account and into yours can feel a bit like getting pandas to mate. You have flown them from the other side of the world, you have built a giant and expensive pen. You have got them the food they like. You have whispered in their ear. You have hoped and prayed and crossed your fingers, thighs and toes. But you can’t force the pandas to fall into each other’s arms. You can’t force anyone to do anything. And that’s a challenge when the bills keep coming in.

Starting a business, or a freelance life, is a process of trial and error. Changing career is a process of trial and error. Instagram gurus seem to think you can sit in a cafe, make a list of your passions and hey presto, the universe will conjure up something that fits the bill. If only. Employers don’t give people jobs just because they suddenly fancy doing them. As Herminia Ibarra says in her seminal book on career change, Working Identity, the best place to start if you want to change career is while you still have a job. You try things. You test things, while you’ve still got a pay cheque coming in. If you haven’t got a pay cheque coming in, it’s a whole different can of worms.

I didn’t and it was messy. My book, The Art of Not Falling Apart, gives some idea of just how messy. A “portfolio career” sounds like fun, and in many ways it is, but each strand – in my case, of political commentating, book reviewing, feature writing, coaching, book writing, professional training, business-building – takes a lot of time and effort. The big challenge when you’re freelance is not doing the work. It’s getting the work. An awful lot of your time and work is invisible and unpaid.

Most work is Hobson’s choice of a kind. If you get the regular pay cheque, the job description is essentially: do whatever the hell your boss says. If you don’t, it’s: do what you like, but you may starve. There are, of course, a million gradations in between. Working life is about fine-tuning those gradations, to the point where the balance between effort, reward, subjugation and autonomy just about works. If you love the work itself, the mix may matter less. It’s all about creating a working life that works for you.

Which brings me back to the curtains. I spent several more hours Googling, of course, but couldn’t find any fabrics I liked as much as the ones that were flawed. Anthony agreed. For us, the pattern, the colours and the general impression mattered more than a neat match at the seams. I like precision in a surgeon, but home is more of a hotch-potch. Sure, I want my curtains to cover the windows at night, but what I really want is for them to cheer me up.

The curtains aren’t yet ready. I’m hoping that the people who are making them will do what we all spend much of our lives trying to do. I’m hoping they’ll turn a sow’s ear into something like a silk purse.