How life changes...

Did you know I used to cut grass to earn some extra pocket money? Not when I was a teenager, but after university, even after my first full-time job at a pharmeceutical research company. I was unemployed for over a year and fed up with sitting at home. It was not for the want of trying either. I sent 40 application letters and received two reject letters. The rest couldn't be bothered. I realise now I had taken the wrong course of action: in our Brave New World we have to rely on ourselves, not on the grace of others. When I finally did get a break, I really enjoyed my job, working on a multilingual helpdesk where I met some of my most long-standing friends.

Relying on myself became a principle I have tried so hard to enforce in my everyday life, but it is often difficult to avoid the help of friends and colleagues. Upon moving up the ladder to the City, where I worked in a foreign bank, I realised I was not going in the right direction. I was hired as a multilingual internet banking interface (or something like that) but I spoke only English at work and when I actually did my multilingual interface role, it was for only five minutes of the day, and even then the client insisted on trying out his/her English. So I contacted the human resources department, told them I was unhappy with my position and I wanted a transfer, and went on holiday. Upon my return, the papers were ready to sign. An effective way to conjure up your own dismissal.

I had by then learned from my awful mistakes the first time round and had saved up a little nestegg, which I used to get something more fitting. Speaking several languages and only speaking your own in your job can be a mighty cold shower when you spent years learning them. I found myself in Prague over New Year 2001, listening to a jazz band and drinking glühwein in the Old Town Square, when my phone rang. It was the head of unit for an official European organisation involved in the control of air traffic, seeking a multilingual contact point for central and eastern Europe. The wages were astronomical, almost unrealistic, and the working hours so unlike anything forced upon you in workaholic London.

I accepted there and then on the phone in Prague, oh and by the way, could I start in 11 days? Naturally! And that's how I ended up in Belgium. I ended up in Leuven, not Brussels, through an old university friend from the Netherlands, who had settled here with his Spanish wife. In 1999 I had taken an EU Institutions exam in Brussels and had followed them back to Leuven for dinner after the gruelling 6-hour tests. I really liked the place from first view and vowed to live here in the future if I ever got a job which permitted me to do so. The European organisation was on the Leuven-Brussels railway line, and without hesitation I arrived, on a rainy 14th January 2001 at the hotel opposite the station while I sorted out an apartment.

It doesn't end there... This was 2001, the year of The Event in the aircraft industry and so when the panic set in, changes were made and excuses were found to shove the newcomers out onto the streets. I had a lot of adjusting to do: going from earning in 4 days what most earned in a month to not earning anything at all meant I needed to move out of my marble-floored, two-bathroomed semi-penthouse with balcony overlooking the historic centre into a clumsy duplex two-roomed shoebox on a thoroughfare opposite the prison, next to a hotel, a hospital, a bordello, and round the corner from a school. Needless to say I was kept awake by the delivery vans, buses, patients, schoolkids, police escorts, ambulances and visitors to the ladies of the night (whom I never saw, of course).

I started to panic when I was down to my last 300 euro and the rent needed paying, so I went back to what I know best - language training. I love it. There's nothing nicer than giving people who are interested the benefit of your knowledge. It all began as a sort of cottage industry: in Belgium, due to the high number of people requiring language skills, most trainers are independent, not employees. Language training is also VAT-free, unlike translation, which while more profitable, is also a damn sight more boring. Relying on myself seemed surely the right way to go after being let down by so many others. I got my break through Marc Smekens, a jolly, charismatic and hard-working self-made Christian rock singer with his own language training company. Originally giving lessons for his outfit, I gradually picked up my own speed until I ended up on the 22nd floor of the second highest tower in Brussels, that of Belgacom, Belgium's monopolistic telecommunications company.

I didn't think it would all explode in my face, until the day I was accused of something which in fact my students had requested. I showed them my photographic website - one of them was going to Slovakia and wanted to see some photos of the place. But because there are photos of models on another section of my website, the potential catastrophe of them catching a glimpse of a scantily clad young lady whilst working drove the training department to pull the plug on me. So I decided to rely on myself once more and get my own clients. Having built up a nice little empire, master of my own domain, I spotted a call for trainers at the European Institutions, only requirement, a degree in languages. There was to be a seminar on the procedures and structures of the Institutions which I found to be quite daunting but within two months I was propelled into the European Commission's training department. I remained there for two and a half years before diversifying to the European Parliament and the Commission's interpretation centre.

I meet people from every country in the EU, who do all kinds of tasks from political advisers to European budget regulators, from MEPs to ushers, from conference interpreters to extra-governmental trainees from outside the EU. I give them all kinds of training from giving presentations and speeches to negotiating in English, from dealing with high-level correspondence to simple grammar courses. No day is ever the same. No semester is ever the same. I have been blessed (so far) with a happy and interesting course in life, which I hope will remain for as long as the contract is renewed.