Priory Secretarial Services

Do you know, being a ‘secretary’ was my Plan A? I didn’t know being a writer could be a career, but when I was 5 or 6 I went to my Daddy’s office and met his Secretary – she’d be an EA nowadays. Her world seemed calm, she seemed lovely, and best of all, she got to spend all day – all day! – with my Dad. I went home and converted my doll’s house into a filing cabinet, cut out coupons from papers and magazines, filled them in and filed them.

Jump forward. I’m 15 at a girls’ convent school in Cheltenham (I’ve mentioned clichés before) when everyone is talking about Anita Roddick and breaking through the glass ceiling at last, while our careers adviser offers us the choice of bank clerk or nurse. I’m on the edge of a group of classmates having a “What I want to be when I grow up” conversation. The fiercely clever and independent HL turns to me. “A secretary,” I whisper. She tells me that isn’t good enough, I’m too bright to have such low ambition, I need to want to change the world. I slip back into my shell.

I’m 18. I go to university and this is my reasoning: “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But I know I will be reading. So I may as well spend 3 years reading at Government expense [oh halcyon days!] and get a degree at the end of it. By then I’ll be 21, I’ll be a grown up, I’ll know what I want to do.”

I’m 21 and being a grown up is no longer something I expect to be. All I know is I want to be able to fund having fun in my spare time. (Writing was knocked out of me by the lack of opportunity in school lessons after O-Levels/GCSEs and a friend reading the first 2 pages of a cursed bloodline romance and finding it boring.) There’s an MA course on Blake called “Literature and the Visual Imagination” and a nearby university offers an excellent Librarian course, but I’m not enough of a self-starter to be able to figure out how I’m going to fund myself to stay at Uni another couple of years. I’m not confident enough to teach. So I go back to Plan A.

I sign up for an NVQ Level III in Business Admin (Level IV came in the following year) and the rest is history. For the first time in my life I discovered I was truly good at something useful. I loved pulling things into order. I loved shorthand – like writing in code. I loved this new WYSIWYG word processing packaging. I achieved one of the first qualifications in DTP, from Pitman’s. I was going into my career just as technology was taking it up to a new level, making it really challenging and fun. I got the basics – touch typing (how often have I freaked out a colleague by chatting while my hands carry on), shorthand (really useful before laptops and reliable recording devices were available), and how to plan and research before PM tools and internet search engines put it all at our fingertips. On that firm foundation, I have spent every year learning with the aim of combining the best of old and new to provide my clients and bosses with support that is both reliable and creative.

If you need that sort of support today, get in touch. If I can’t help, I will probably know someone that can. https://priorysecretarial.co.uk/contact/