Several days' worth of nothing important

The thing is, if you allow yourself one day off from posting on your blog, you sort of slip into a non-blogging area where it no longer matters, and suddenly several days have passed. Well, it's true, it doesn't matter at all, and hardly anybody reads these words of wisdom anyway, but still, it's a sort of discipline thing and it should be good for the soul or something.

So, dear readers, you must be gasping, by now, to know what I've been doing that has taken me away from the . . . er . . . blogosphere. (Can't decide whether that's an appallingly horrible word or not, yet. I'd better try using it for a bit and see how I feel about it.)

The coffee I drank at Friday's class left me with a headache on Saturday, which turned out to be a completely wasted day, so nothing to write about there. Sunday was the usual round of dog-walking in the muddy old cowfield, visiting Sainsbury's and Steve's dad, and trying to catch up on some boring work later, which was interrupted by the welcome distraction of a phonecall from Chris. So . . . nothing to write about there, either.

Monday was back to Carlisle for Class Number Two, which probably was worth writing about, actually. What I am learning is how to say, "no," to the wrong sort of customers, and how to identify the right sort, and offer them something that we do better than any of our competitors. We do lots of things pretty well, and this is our problem, really. We're spread too thinly. If we can identify the things we do better than anyone else - (not necessarily the things we do best, as others may do them equally well) - then we have a competitive edge, and we can concentrate on these, become specialists, and build up a reputation for being the very best at those things, so that when people want those particular things done, we will be the obvious choice to do them. I came away filled with ideas. We go back again next Monday for more. What fun!

The only problem is getting up early. I spent Sunday night packing up parcels for mail order customers, meaning I didn't get to bed until after 1am, but had to get up again about 6am. Not enough sleep. (Hence the coffee!) Fortunately DP is such an interesting tutor that I managed not to doze off at all. Oh, and I won another bottle of wine! (We never had incentives like this at school.)

Had to stop on the way into Carlisle at a small post office to despatch my parcels, and then dash to the bank at lunchtime. It's hard work trying to keep things operating while being incarcerated in a classroom all day. Before I could go home I had to make a trip to pick up a monitor for Steve that we'd found on Freecycle: he's put a W98 computer together to play old games on but had no monitor for it. (Apparently they don't run on WXP.) Then a dash to the other end of town to get catfood.
We need a photo here, don't we? It can get very boring without illustrations. Let's see . . . Here's Mr Fire and Brimstone, proclaiming the wrath of God upon the sinners of Carlisle,(and there are many), doing his rather second-rate best to imitate The Rev Ian Paisley. He stood beneath the statue of a long-deceased mayor of the city, ranting away diligently, with his minder standing quietly by, but nobody stopped to listen. I'm afraid I didn't feel any more doomed than I had before I saw him, and having grown up in the shadow of Pastor Jack Glass in Edinburgh, I'm fairly immune by now.

Down Bank Street I came across yet another Eastern European-looking busker playing accordion - this time a pretty young woman with gappy teeth. (She obviously hasn't come across the other European immigrants to our shores yet - the Polish dentists.) Anyhoo . . . I approached her, smiling, in the same way I'd approached the guys on Friday who had grinned and posed so nicely for me, but she waved me away with a look of alarm on her face. I tried to show her that I'd pay for the privilege of photographing her, pointing to my handbag and purse, but she kept shaking her head and waving my camera away. I have no intention of taking photos of people who want to remain anonymous, so I left her in peace. I suspect, though, that she may be here illegally, or is trying to hide from someone. It would be fascinating to hear her story.

While writing captions for some of my other Carlisle photos on Flickr I had to do a bit of research and discovered the interesting fact that the famous factory chimney (Carlisle's main landmark, really), known as Dixon's Chimney, was the 8th highest factory chimney in the world at 305 feet. I've yet to get a really good photo of it - it always looks wonderful as you drive past, but I've not found the best viewpoint for it yet.

And today? Getting back to normal working again, which means I finished a cane chair at 11.30pm. I hope to deliver it to its owners on Saturday. While working I watched a programme where these two young doctors - identical twins and both completely mad - go around the world finding out about how other cultures deal with sickness and pain. Today they were in Asia, and as an experiment joined in one of these ceremonies where participants get metal skewers pushed through their faces and tongues. One brother went through all the rituals beforehand, which were supposed to make him immune to pain, while the other acted as a control. Didn't seem to work. They both found it excrutiating. However, later on, one of them seemed to find the secret. You still feel the pain, you just no longer let it bother you. It's a state of mind. Fascinating stuff.