Reading. Read through the text “Life at the Bottom: Hard-Up, Tired but Content” and do the exercises that follow

Read through the text “Life at the Bottom: Hard-Up, Tired but Content” and do the exercises that follow.

Life at the Bottom: Hard-Up, Tired but Content

To most people, changing jobs means stepping up the ladder: more money, a higher position, travel perhaps, more perks, the next rung on the way to a so-called better life. So why change?

Marian Thiel has been changing jobs ever since she first started working at the age of 18 when she was a sales assistant in a fashion store in Bristol. She had left school with three O-levels – Art, English, Needlework. By 1998, at the age of 31, she was senior executive in charge of public relations at Chester Barrie, a fashion menswear house in Crewe. She was on a salary of 13, 400 pounds – plus perks. She had a secretary, a company car and first-class travel expenses. She went to the hairdresser once a week (paid for, of course) and on the strength of her job and prospects had got herself a three-bedroomed semi on the river at Congleton.

“I used to have my nails painted just to look better”, she says now, almost in disbelief, “and I used to take taxis everywhere so my hair didn’t get wet or blown about. I was out every day for lunch or dinner with customers. I was out of the office on business four days out of five, very often in London, France, or Germany. If I went to Scotland, I flew – and there was always a chauffeur and a car to meet me.”

About two years ago she gave it all up to become a nurse. Her pay during her first year as a student State Registered Nurse at St. Stephen’s Hospital, London, was 250 pounds a month: 160 pounds went back to Cheshire to pay for her mortgage. Suddenly she was living off 90 pounds a month – and no expenses. “I used to walk along the streets of Westminster crying, ” she says. “Of course, it was my decision not to let the house go – just because you make a break you don’t have to give up everything.”

She has now moved back to her house in Congleton in Cheshire, having transferred to a local hospital for the last year of her training. The pay is a bit better now – 360 pounds a month with overtime – but the hours are long and she finds the work physically exhausting. There are certainly no trips to the hairdresser, no spending sprees.

So why did she do if? What happened to the normal job pattern? She is patently not someone who has just opted out of the rat-race. She admits she loves the good life, and offered the chance of a job at 20, 000 pounds tomorrow, she would jump at it. “I could pick up and live again as though I had never been poor, ” she says. But, she goes on, she feels we all have a debt to society. “It’s rather like the land, ” she says. “The times we are living in now are very materialistic, everyone’s on the make, everything’s got to be brighter and newer. We’re all taking things out and never putting back. And what happens if you do that to the land? You get barren soil. I certainly never wanted to be a nurse, but I realized that I had to give instead of just take.”

Victoria Hainworth