Jane Shepherdson on the career break everyone needs
After Amber Rudd revealed she went Interrailing for a month, Jane Shepherdson tells of her own ‘no plan’ adventure
We typically think of travelling for long periods as the preserve of the young and free. Yet this week we learned that Amber Rudd, in her “half-gap year” away from the Cabinet, spent a month Interrailing around Europe. Rudd, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, is 55. I was the same age when I, too, went off travelling during midlife. And I can attest to how worthwhile it is.
In the normal run of things, it’s rare that you stop, take a step back and really look at the world around you. It perhaps wasn’t something I did all that much myself until I went away on my own adult gap year.
It was 2016, and I’d been the co-owner of the fashion brand Whistles for eight years. I was starting to feel a little stale and ready for a change when I was offered a new job in San Francisco. It wasn’t a role that I fancied, but it did spark a tempting idea: wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to live in San Francisco for a bit? In our mid-50s, my husband Barry and I felt ready for a year of total freedom and spontaneity, so we decided to leave London and take the plunge.
In the name of living in the moment, we didn’t do much planning. One thing we did do was rent out our house, which meant we had to declutter. After many years working in fashion, this gave me an unexpectedly good feeling: the sense of being less weighed down by possessions, which has stayed with me ever since.
The other planning we did was to outline our journey’s first leg: a drive from New York to Vancouver and a month’s Airbnb stay in the latter. After this, we decided, we would follow the sun down the continent, spending three months in Vancouver, three in San Francisco and three in Los Angeles. It was truly the loosest of plans, with all the other details to be coloured-in fully as we went.
Family and friends weren’t surprised. I think they’ve always seen me as a bit of a maverick at heart. I’ve always done what I’ve wanted to do, or what I thought was the right thing to do. Many of my female friends said they couldn’t have spent a year travelling with their husband. But mine was the only person I’d have wanted to do this with at all. We are, more than anything, really good friends, and though we both have our own interests, we shared a longing to explore to the max and see as much as possible on our journey.
And explore we did. We bought an old car and a canoe in Canada, and every place we stopped at we did mini-road trips to everywhere we’d ever wanted to visit in America: Palm Springs, Yosemite, all the beaches along the west coast, and so on. The freedom was intoxicating, but it was also double-edged. Suddenly, no one cared what I was doing any more, which is rather a strange feeling when you’ve been a CEO for so long. But it’s also very far from unpleasant, and I enjoyed the sudden sense of empowerment it brought.
Actively not planning what to do from day to day forces you to live in the moment. It opens you up to new experiences, new friends.
Making friends, in fact, was easier than you might think. Although we were staying more in Airbnbs than in the youth hostels typically favoured by young gap-year travellers, the social interactions we might have had in our youth were no harder to come by in our 50s. In America, the people we met were very friendly and happy to welcome us into their lives, despite knowing we’d only be there a short while. This was fortunate because, as much as I enjoyed travelling with Barry, we may well have grown bored had we been confined to nothing but each other’s company for a year.
The only noticeable difference between travelling in my 50s and travelling in my teens, before I started college, was I probably drank a bit less. But even so, it still felt hedonistic.
You might think I would miss having structure to my days, but I hardly did. Not that I was permanently elated: there were certainly times when we woke in the morning and just thought: “My goodness, what on earth are we doing? This is just ridiculous…” But then we’d get up, have a coffee and sit on the porch in the sun, and the reasons would start coming back to us: we’d worked hard all our lives and we were lucky to have this chance to step away.
It wasn’t the first time I’d done this, in truth. When I left my job as brand director for Topshop in 2007, I took a year out before starting at Whistles. I travelled around South America for three months, went riding in Spain and crammed in many more things.
After this, I realised what was possible, and since then I’ve always thought that if something isn’t right, or there’s too much negative energy in your life, you don’t have to stay where you are: on the contrary, you’re free to just go.
By the end of my second adult gap year I was, admittedly, ready to come home. We had ended our travels with a month-long drive from LA to New York and, for the most part, had been on our own, which can become a little lonely at times.
But, overall, the trip was eyeopening; an experience that will always stay with me. And it taught me some valuable lessons: that slowing down gives you more out of life; that you needn’t feel trapped doing anything; and that, above all, it’s your choice. You can make of your life what you want.