I woke up this morning. Which in itself is quite an achievement as I was watching the election results play out until the early hours. Eventually, however, I surrendered to the duvet. So when I woke up, I grimaced as I swiped my phone to life. BBC News Alert. Oh god, it’s all over, I immediately thought Theresa May has probably won by a landslide in the last hundred seats. She has probably already started hunting foxes, feasting on the new-born babies of every single teenage mother and executing pensioners that don’t sell their house to fund her billionaire chums cocaine habit.
I clicked. I read on. We were safe. The Tory juggernaut had not got the predicted landslide, it appeared to have stalled, backfired and suffocated in its own exhaust fumes. Although it wasn’t all good news, she’d still got the most seats… so despite her losing in just about every other imaginable sense, she had technically won. Just.
Labour, on the other hand, had lost, but they’d also won. They have thrown a spanner of such magnitude into the Tory machine that it’s surely close to being written off. Theresa May is scrabbling around the political dregs of Westminster trying to form an alliance with the DUP. The DUP are essentially the most backwards thinking group of morons imaginable. Some of their ideologies would make KKK members uncomfortable. They have incredibly strong links to terrorism in Northern Ireland. And they are to form a government with Theresa May.
She warned us that there would be a “Coalition of Chaos”, she just didn’t say that she would be leading it. But, I didn’t start writing this to moan about the election. So let’s move on.
So, in addition to the election, a lot has happened since my last blog post. Too much to even begin to mention. You’ll already be fully aware of the disaster that was Brexit, where 17,410,742 people voted to leave the EU. Sounds like a huge number, and it is. But not as huge as 46,500,001 (this was the total number of people eligible to vote in the referendum). A basic analysis of the maths would tell you that only 37% of the public have forced the hand of our confused and bewildered government into triggering Article 50, to start the process of leaving the EU.
You will also, no doubt, know that the even the most satirical and obscene scenario in Private Eye can become a reality. Of course, I am referring to the orange-faced fuck-nugget that is Donald Trump. I simply don’t have the vocabulary to verbalise my feelings on this cretin so I won’t try. He has led a campaign based on hate, idiocy and fear. I have recently visited the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (which is superb, sobering and informative), and I couldn’t help but note the similarities between Trump’s campaign and the earliest actions of the Nazi party. Enough about the small-handed, toupée’d shit-badger. Back to me.
I quit Royal Caribbean. Yes, I know. Why would you leave a position that paid you to travel around the world, on a ship?! Well, two main reasons, like anything, it’s not as great as it seems. And more importantly, I got a better offer. Mos (my wife) and I had been working for Royal Caribbean for a couple of years, and we reached a point where we simply couldn’t deal with the internal politics and red-tape.
But what was this ‘better offer’? Well, I was offered a role at Trickbox TV in London – back in the UK. I would join their small team as the project manager. Taking over the project management responsibilities of the managing director as the company grew. Strangely the studio that I would be working in was one that I had worked in when it was under the management of a different company – Flint London. This is also how I first met the MD of Trickbox – Liam.
Trickbox was great. The picture above is the view from the studio! I was there for a year. Great team, brilliant location and some interesting projects. Some of which I will blog about separately. But… there was a problem. I wanted something different. I needed a challenge and I didn’t feel that I could progress in that role. More than this, I didn’t feel like I could progress while still working in TV. There is also the huge factor of commuting. When working in TV, you’re tied to London. You either live in London, or you commute into it. Both are expensive. And both are things that I wanted to cut from my life.
Frustratingly, I still haven’t won the Euromillions, so this new challenge had to be something that produced an income. This small but key caveat limited my options drastically. I was essentially looking for a role that would; pay me, challenge me, reward me mentally and financially, and finally… not be linked to London (or ideally any cities in general). It would also be nice for the new role to be something that I could do anywhere in the world.
I had started to see adverts for training to become a teacher. These became more and more targeted and frequent as I searched for roles online. The internet is a wonderful and terrifying thing. It was soon sending me adverts, so specifically tailored to me that I thought about drawing the curtains, locking the door and applying for a restraining order.
The adverts/emails would be something along the lines of this; ‘Looking for a challenge? Receive a bursary of £30,000 to train to teach Physics’. They knew I was looking for a challenge, that’s not difficult – I was searching for ‘dream jobs’, ‘jobs working from home’ and all kinds of other terms. They knew I was looking to be paid for whatever I was going to do next – not a difficult assumption if they knew I was looking for a job.
The next part is where it gets interesting. I have a BSc (Hons) degree, which for those who don’t know, is a Batchelor of Science with Honours degree. But I don’t think this is publically ‘out there’ on the company websites, blogs or staff pages that I’ve appeared on. But, it’s more specific than that. I have always been a huge physics fan. I love reading articles about the latest developments in space exploration, energy, climate science and a whole load more. Google knows this.
So, to cut a long story short, as I am painfully aware that I’m edging closer and closer to 1,200 words in this post… In July 2016 I joined a number of courses with the University of Sussex, Weydon School and the Department for Education. These courses include post-graduate physics, PGCE (PostGraduate Certificate in Education), TSST (Teach Subject Specialism Training) and QTS (which is essentially a license to teach issued by the government).
I am now, at the time of writing this, about 30 hours away from completing my last task for all of the mentioned courses. From that point onward, I will be a fully qualified and licensed teacher of physics. Wish me luck.
Tom Mumford 