Swapping status for a simple life

This morning when I got up, I looked down the garden and saw that the willow tree had come into leaf practically overnight. This time a couple of years ago I would barely have recognised a willow tree, let alone owned one.

At the time, my garden was a patio that's about the size of my current kitchen table; but this patio was attached to a rather lovely four-bedroom house in Battersea.

I had acquired this des res through luck; my husband Joel and I bought before prices went through the roof. But still, we'd lavished a lot of attention and cash on the place, and it was something to mark off on the life-list of things to do (buy nice, big house and hold dinner parties in it, tick). Simply living in the centre of London had seemed like an achievement in itself for many years. Compared to staid Bournemouth, where I'd grown up, and down-to-earth Birmingham, where I'd been a student, London was a truly glitzy metropolis (move to big city and zoom around it in high heels, tick).

Work was going well, too. I was on the staff of a national newspaper, earning a salary that was more than my dad had ever earned in his life, and while I was no millionaire, within reason I could buy what I wanted. Not having children, I was free to spend my income on whatever I wished - eating out in that week's fashionable restaurant, a regular cut and colour at a smart London salon, shopping for clothes and shoes - all the things that provide the treats in the life of a working girl. I had "made it" as a successful professional (another big, red tick), and I loved telling people what I did.

The trouble was that, despite the house, the income, the job title and all the other status symbols I had managed to acquire, somehow I couldn't quite see the next rung on the ladder. I felt that I should be hungrier for success, steadily progressing my career to where ...?

I realised that I wasn't interested in more responsibility and the high profile that came with it; and although it would have been nice to have more money, I certainly didn't need it enough to launch into a frenzy of super-hard graft and major networking. I'd reached a plateau; I was chugging along.

Chugging isn't the way to achieve upward career velocity and enhanced status. So perhaps, I reasoned, it wasn't upward career velocity and enhanced status I wanted, but some other kind of change. That was when we decided to "drop out", exit the rat race and step off the career ladder. Instead of seeking status, we would snub it. We found a house in Dorset, with a big garden, in a tiny village. I first of all went part-time, then took a deep breath and became officially self-employed. Joel, also a journalist, took a demotion, went part-time, absorbed a 40 per cent salary cut and set himself up to work from home.

And at first the shock of giving up all those things I'd worked extremely hard to lay my hands on was considerable. But when status insecurity rears its ugly head, here are some of the factors that knock it down again. Lack of a prestigious job title doesn't necessarily mean I work less hard. (This is a pity.) But at least I have some choice in what I do and when and where.

And I get more done, because a lot of status enhancing involves wasting time and money. I don't have to spend eighty quid on a pair of shoes or pay for office clothes that you shell out to dry-clean again and again; I hardly have to shop at all. I don't have to fork out £50 for an indifferent restaurant meal and then £20 more for a taxi home. I don't have to fight my way round the supermarket on a Saturday morning (I can go on Tuesday at three and play Supermarket Sweep all on my own). I'm no longer bound up in the presentee culture, so I can build in time for myself, and for the first time in decades I can start to learn something new and different, just as we're always told we should.

Other status-snubbers feel similarly that the freedom outweighs the lack of clout (and regular pay cheque). My cousin Ellie stunned us by packing in a high-flying job in management consultancy, selling a spiffy London flat, and taking off on a year-long, round-theworld yacht race. She came back last autumn and now, in her late thirties, is living in the wilds of Gloucestershire doing short-term contract work. Does my fellow status snubber regret losing the company car, mobile phone, laptop, impressive business cards, etc? Nope. "I don't give a monkey's. Once I'd made the leap off the ladder, it was easy. Other pieces of my life have fallen into place, and now it's not all about job, money, status."

These days, it's rare for me to feel the odd flicker of status insecurity, though if I happen to pass through Clapham Junction, I can just see the back of our former home. It makes me feel a little faint wondering what it might be worth now; I deliberately avoid the London property pages. But on the positive side, I've rediscovered my ambition.

The status symbols I'm chasing now aren't the obvious ones, but they are equally hard to tick off and satisfying to achieve: finding a balance that means working hard and living well, but not so hard I don't have time for family and friends; making a proper place for myself in a genuine community; cultivating a garden that's both beautiful and edible; running a home, not just maintaining a house.

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