"Dear Gareth Southgate," I'd Say...

Photo by Vikram TKV on Unsplash

I think I may have a bit of a thing for Gareth Southgate.

I mean I kind of knew he existed and that he liked waistcoats and that he once told a whole country off in a letter called ‘Dear England’ that ended up becoming a play, but I’d never really paid much attention to him.

But now it’s like one of those films where someone is desperately in love with someone else, like their best friend or their next-door neighbour or the colleague that sits across the office and we, the audience, know it, but the object of their affection doesn’t and we spend ninety minutes hoping for a happy ending and then suddenly with only a few minutes to go, the one who is loved turns round and looks at the other and sees them as if it's for the first time and makes some sort of speech about how they’ve been there all along. And I tried to think of an example of one of those films and I went down a google with no luck whatsoever. And I wondered if I’d imagined this type of storyline and maybe mixed it up with my own adolescence and then I remembered the prom and the “I love you. Always” in Pretty in Pink and how despite willing it to, nothing like that ever happened at my school formal.

And I thought about how I’d also had a bit of thing for Andrew McCarthy in the 1980s because he was sensitive and intelligent and usually lovesick, and he’d dealt well with the Egyptian princess reincarnated as a mannequin, and he was the kind of man I hoped to marry when I was thirteen. And I started watching clips of him and I found that iconic “I gave him a key” scene and I remembered how I was once very sad, and I bought a DVD of St Elmo’s Fire to watch under a duvet on repeat. And this is how I spent my Thursday afternoon, reminiscing about unrequited love.

But back to Gareth Southgate. It all started last Sunday. After almost a week of being house-bound due to what the weather forecasters described as an Arctic freeze and saying things like “no I can’t go out, I see sparkles” and doing things like reluctantly agreeing to go out as long as my husband held my hand, and then walking two feet beyond my gate and complaining that he was pulling me too hard, and returning home in a huff, and generally behaving like an octogenarian with osteoporosis, I eventually went outside again on the Sabbath day. And as I gave thanks for blessings such as fresh air, I listened to Desert Island Discs and there was Gareth who I knew very little about picking his favourite tunes and even though I did conclude they were a bit middle-of-the-road, I wasn’t as harsh as The Telegraph who dismissed them as ‘utterly vanilla’ and said, “If all else fails for Gareth Southgate while he invites new career offers on LinkedIn, there is the fallback option of a lifetime of work in easy-listening radio”.

And I couldn’t quite determine what it was about him that so appealed to me but then there’s something about love that you can’t quite put your finger on and it was somewhere in between his choice of Ed Sheeran and his choice of Adele when he talked about leaving his role as the England football manager, which I may or may not have known he’d left, that I decided we were soulmates.

And he said:

“That chapter in my life is closed now. I’ve got to recognise that the team has to go on and the organisation has to go on and I’ve got to give them space as much as possible. I’ve been the man in that seat, and I would never want to be in the way making performance for them more difficult”.

And because he’d said stuff in the past like, “I know my voice carries weight, not because of who I am but because of the position that I hold”, I knew he was describing something that was incredibly painful, that closing of a chapter and making space, that there was loss of identity in this, and mixed feelings about walking away from something that he’d built, and apprehension about venturing into the unknown, but he’d known it was time and he’d done it anyway and he’d trusted someone called Thomas to carry on his legacy regardless of how he did it and I reckoned he’d be ok because he had a wife and kids and a dog that mattered to him and a dads' book club he belonged to. And I thought here’s a fellow traveller as he shared how he’d approached his future, how he’d talked to people who’d been in big jobs and got advice on how they’d left and he wasn’t against the next part of his life being something totally different and even though he hadn’t found them yet, he believed there would be challenges out there that would excite him and I felt for him as he sat in that period of waiting.

And I may have mentioned that I have a book coming out in March 2025, but I may not have explained what it’s about. And even though some of you are kind enough to come back every Friday to read the latest ‘Days Like This’, you probably know very little about me and how in 2021 in what was not a post-pandemic midlife crisis but a lingering malaise I’d had since 2019, I made the decision to leave something that had been part of my life for a long time, something that had formed a major part of who I was and I had no idea what I would do and who I would be and none of it was easy. And whilst this may or may not end up being the blurb that makes it on to the back cover, I’ve written a book all about leaving.

Often, the signs are there. We know we need to leave. But whether it’s a job, a relationship, a place, a situation, or even a set of beliefs, it’s hard to start again. It takes courage and maybe even a plan.

So, what happens when you decide it’s time to leave a twenty-year career and find yourself trying to figure out who you are, what now, what next?

Deborah Sloan woke up one August morning and realised she couldn’t do another September, not if it was going to be the same as the September before and the ones before that and the ones yet to come. Something had to change. In this series of essays, packed with honest and humorous reflections, Deborah describes her journey of leaving.

Covering a range of topics including identity, image, career, marriage, motherhood and faith, Deborah explores what happens when you begin to question everything you thought mattered in life and realise it’s not just one thing you have to leave.

And now that the book is complete and the journey of leaving is somewhat over, there is something I wish I could tell Gareth because it took me a lot of processing and over 53,000 words to realise this and because I have a thing for him, I’d be delighted to help him cut a few corners. “Dear Gareth Southgate,” I’d say. “You don’t need to know what you are to do and who you are to be. You just need to know what’s enough”.

And even though it never makes sense to give away the ending, I’d tell him how my journey of leaving ends, and it ends with the description of what could be described as the most boring of days, yet for me, the most perfect, doing this and that with the people I care about most and I say:

“This just might be enough. Life”.