With retirement looming I suppose it's about time to take stock of an uneventful career that has taken me from big city Lyon to small town Dijon and latterly to small village Aubigny. Downhill all the way, you could say, if Leonard Woolf hadn't already done so!
The staggering thing about my 25 years in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) is how little I can remember about it. But I can say that what makes language teaching such an attractive profession at the outset is eventually what makes it so frustrating. Je m'explique. In the language learning/ teaching situation, teacher and student are limited to and by what they can say and understand. This makes for a peculiarly innocent and simple relationship - a childlike relationship among adults. Although enriching, this extraordinary world, in which reality is forever simulated but never actually experienced, eventually got me down.
So I was pleased to move on to my second career as a freelance translator and, despite some very hair-raising moments, have never really regretted it.
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