I Have Gone In Lots Of Directions Along The Way And Am Now Extremely Satisfied With Things
I have lived in the Black Country now for 16 years. It’s weird as that is longer than I was at school and yet it remains so fresh and new. In fact, I travelled to a school reunion last weekend and it was odd seeing everybody in adulthood as I have not seen any of them since the day I walked away from school. I’m very good about being naughty at losing contact with old friends and not keeping in touch. I seem to find that I think ‘I wonder how so and so is’ and suddenly think that I haven’t heard from them in 5 years and feel too guilty to pick up the phone. Thank goodness for social networking!
I came up here originally when I began freelancing when I was contracted to IBM on a job for the Midlands Electricity Board which was great fun. Since then my career has taken a number of changes in both job and region, but now I am operating a firm that offers SEO and IT support services to small business in the Black Country area and the wider West Midlands. It means that I get work at home which is actually the one place I’ve ever wanted to work. I have been lucky enough that contracting has let me to go to other places and I have been to Brentwood, Coventry, Newcastle upon Tyne and, most gloriously, Canberra before an all too concise return to the North East.
But I love being in the Black Country and driving out and looking around it. It really is extremely beautiful, rather like my beloved Surrey, but different naturally in that we are set in the centre of the Industrial Revolution. We need not have to move far to be surrounded by the remains of bygone times. This section of the Black Country was renowned for chain and glass construction. The chains and anchors for the Titanic were manufactured here and the movement of them to the railway was recently re-enacted for a Channel 4 programming. There are also canals anywhere you go linking the coal, iron and steel production areas to the wider world.
The majority of it has now faded of course, although bespoke metal bashing and steel product makers still exist. The modern Black Country now builds around small industrial firms, high tech services and some dependence on the transport industry which remains prominent in the West Midlands with Jaguar Land Rover, and Rover also making a low level return.
For me though, I am more than satisfied now working for myself, using the knowledge that I’ve learnt in my career and using them on my own terms. I gathered how to do IT support many years ago when I was working for British Gas and used a break from programming to learn something new, and that has remained with me through the period where I have been able to fix problems for colleagues I’m working with quickly and remove the need to call out the support teams. SEO I have been trained in later life and have discovered that it is completely suited to the way I love to work and have always had an ambition to do as I have always been fond of creative writing.
So for the foreseeable future, I will remain focused on SEO with a little IT support as and when needed.