In any memoir it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject's nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this!"
I could have claimed these to be my own words, but I've placed them in inverted commas to show that I took them from the first paragraph in Paul Theroux's book "Saint Jack". It is about an expatriate living in Singapore who begins to fear dying, alone and vulnerable, in an alien tropic, which may well be why I left what has been the best job I've ever had when I was stationed in Rangoon in what was then Burma.
There I was, twenty-nine years old, with an accounting degree on which the ink had hardly dried, occupying the position of chef-comptable with the French oil company TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles.
I occupied a sumptuous office which I shared with three Burmese accountants and two beautiful secretaries, was chaffeur-driven to and from work in a brandnew PEUGEOT 504, and lived in a gracious British Empire-style mansion in the leafy parts of Rangoon where I was being waited on hand and foot by four domestic staff. To top it all, I earned a salary several times higher than what I could have earned at home.
Did I stay when the French general manager almost begged me, first in French and then in broken English, to renew my twelve-month contract? I didn't, and to this day I still don't know why I didn't! I loved my job, I loved Burma and its people, but boredom, hubris, call it what you want, maybe even the money piling up in my bank account back home, made me chuck it all in — and I have lived to regret it over and over again.
What I should have known was that after having reached such a peak, everything else thereafter would taste like ashes in my mouth. For several years I kept thrashing about, looking for another job like it, and I wasted a whole six years before I finally hit my stride again in 1982 when I became the group financial controller for a large commodity trader in Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is not beautiful Burma.
Perhaps the first sentence in my memoir yet to be written should read, "Reaching your peak too soon often means you have nowhere left to go."
