Category: business

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Lost Photos

Today my computer informs me that:

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…

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Stream of Consciousness

I got a bit distracted yesterday – or maybe I didn’t. Maybe you were enthralled by my ramblings about: what was that actor’s name, and should I try knitting jumpers based on William Morris designs, or would they look like shit, and would that matter anyway, as long as I had fun doing it? (I missed out the bit about looking up stroke symptoms on Google).

I can’t really work out whether the fact that my mind works like that is unusual or not, given that I can’t get inside anyone else’s head to find out how they think. Up until a few years ago, I assumed that’s the way everyone thinks, that constantly rolling narrative, the barrage of words running through the head, and when I discovered that some people actually think in pictures  (allegedly most people, though I find that hard to believe) it – well – blew my mind. I mean, maybe partially – I can ‘visualise’ some things, but I have to make a conscious effort to do – but as a main way of thinking? How do you visualise abstract concepts? I had this conversation with a friend a while back, and he said that he sees the words as he thinks them. To me that sounds bizarre.

But I started this train of thought by thinking about whether I can control my thoughts. The theme of those pep talks I used to listen to over a full English was that it is possible to control your thinking and by doing so change your life, but my mind seems to have a mind of its own. The actors’ names and knitting designs kind of thoughts don’t bother me at all – except when they interfere with my ability to do more important stuff (which is quite often). I don’t even particularly mind the might I have a stroke and will the cancer come back thoughts too much – they’re awful at the time, of course, but tend not to come very often or last very long.

The ones that really get to me are the regular, unavoidable ones that come in the early hours, or occasionally in the day time, the: I hate myself and wish I was dead, why has everything I’ve ever tried to do with my life come to nothing, why do I always give up on everything, why can’t I write anything apart from this drivel? Those are the ones I’d really like to be able to control. Daylight and doing things can sometimes blow them away – knitting, crochet, reading etc are usually pretty reliable; walking by the sea can be too, but it requires effort to get myself out of the house (not always easy, even when there isn’t a lockdown). Being with other people can be, but it’s risky, it can also have the opposite effect, so in general being by myself is safer.

Writing these daily essays – I think that helps too. I usually feel better afterwards, anyway, even if I don’t have anything to say.

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.

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Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

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What am I Worth?

What am I worth?

This was a question posed to me yesterday by my therapist.

‘Imagine it as a title on your blog’ she said. ‘What would you say? I’m trying to challenge you.’

She’d accused me of being obsessed with monetary value, with trying to apply a monetary value to who I am and the things I do.

‘Very early on in this process’ she said ‘maybe in the second session or so, you were quick to tell me that, although you’re financially comfortable, the money you were living off had come to you from your husband in the divorce settlement, and somehow it’s not due to your own efforts’ (or words to that effect – I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember exactly what she said).

Which is true. But what I’d just been talking about was the amount of time that goes into things which I know have no realistic possibility of a monetary return, specifically my knitting and crochet (and of course, so obvious that it wasn’t even brought into the conversation, my writing). I’d mentioned that earlier this week I’d been asked how much I would ‘charge’ to make something as a commission – a question I never know how to answer, because half the time I say too much and put them off, and the other half I aim too low, which can also put people off, or just leave me thinking that I’ve undersold myself and somehow failed in that way. Underlying this, I suppose, is an assumption that I am a professional person who sees the things I make in terms of exchange, and has a system for determining prices, whereas from my point of view, they’re just the (rarely useful, and occasionally embarrassing) results of me finding enjoyable ways to pass the time – in other words, hobbies. Incidentally, the word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word for ‘love’, meaning someone who does something for the love of it, so that a century ago, ‘amateurs’ in most fields (particularly sport) were afforded more respect than supposedly self-serving ‘professionals’.

I know all this, I know that for creative work the price depends on what someone is prepared to pay, rather than the effort that went into doing it, and I also know the argument put forward by creative people that the workman is worthy of his hire. And I know that I’ve never been able to square this circle, and this is a big reason why I’ve never been able to make a success of business, and it all ties up with social anxiety, lack of self belief, and not being able to ask for anything from other people.

But I can’t see the leap from this to the suggestion that I’m fixated on monetary value. She mentioned the struggle to change the law so that it affords value to the traditionally unpaid work of housework and child-rearing, but to me, any capable adult should be able to pay for their own needs. To be continued…

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Cloudy

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

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Monday Mouse Mayhem

‘This is the way the world turns…’

There was a line to go after that, it came into my head while I was making coffee, and went on for a little way, and I thought: this could be going somewhere, let’s follow it for a bit… But by the time I was sitting at the keyboard, I’d forgotten what I’d done with that second line, and so it’s gone, another aborted poem, and my head throws me a line: ‘…every song in my heart dies a bornin’.., not one of mine but from a song I knew fifty-odd years ago, and I have to sing it in my head till I get to the refrain and remember it’s ‘The Last Thing on my Mind’, by Tom somebody (not Lehrer) a sad little heart-brakey song which I always thought fitted will with Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright’, and if I was a singer I would sing them both at tonce, one after the other, two siodes of the same coin, but I never did because I’m not a singer.

Now something has happened to the mouse, it’s not working and it’s so long since I used the touch pad on this keyboard (even though I use the one on the laptop every time and don’t even know where the laptop mouse is), I just can’t seem to get it, and so everything since ‘…every…’ is now in italics and I can’t work out how to change it back.

Also did I mention that the top toolbar keeps disappearing, unless I move the cursor up there, which given what I just said about the mouse and not knowing how to use the touchpad, is tricky. But at least you can see that I’ve now rectified the italics, and also went back and corrected a lot of the typoes, but left just a few in to keep you on your toes, and also as a general illustration of my dyspraxia-fuelled nonsense, which I usually manage to cover up quite easily.

What an odd, yet oddly typical, start to the day. Also when I started the computer, my desktop was showing the image I was talking about a few weeks ago, the one of a harbour that I couldn’t place, but thought was either Italy or the south of France, and then couldn’t find and spent ages scrolling through the folder. This time I did identify it, checked the properties and found out it was taken on 10 March 2012, which I thought meant San Sebastian or Barcelona. Then I started looking for drafts of Single to Sirkeci  and couldn’t find where the files were, which is worrying. I found a very early version on the external hard drive, which I couldn’t open because it’s a different version of In Design, then I found a pdf of that draft, but that didn’t have the dates on each section, which I did in the later drafts…

Just realised I’ve written way over 500 words. Stopping now.

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Dream Thingy

Where did that dream come from, of travelling alone across Europe and writing as I went? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, pulling together many threads from different parts of my life, even back as far as my Dad’s wild ‘holiday’ ideas of semi-spontaneously piling us all into the car and driving off to some remote (for us) region, finding a bed-and-breakfast when we got there. And of course there’s that recurring leitmotif, of Running Away in search of an ill-defined ‘different life’.

After I left my husband in 2009, I had equally ill-defined hopes and expectations of finding a new job/career and becoming financially self-sufficient; starting a new relationship (either with a ‘soul-mate’, or perhaps a series of lovers who would all remain good friends until the inevitable time when the ‘soul-mate’ would enter my life); and, naturally, writing novels. Travelling was bound up in that, because it was only when I was travelling on my own (which I was doing increasingly from the mid to late 1990s onwards) that any of those things began to feel remotely possible. The irony that none of them have happened, despite my efforts to create the conditions in which they might, has dominated the decade just past.

In 2010-11, in between job-hunting, temping, and part-time admin jobs, I tried to start a business selling my graphic and web design skills to other small business owners. I soon found out I was just as incapable of attracting potential clients as potential employers or lovers, but I got involved in a small business networking circuit, through which I made some contacts and met some nice people (as well as picking up a habit of getting up early and going out for delicious but dangerously unhealthy breakfasts).

One of these nice people was a lady who described herself as a life coach, who asked me what my ‘dreams’ were, to which I answered that I didn’t have ‘dreams’ any more, because experience had taught me that dreams never turn out the way you think they will. This was slightly disingenuous, because despite everything, I still had those underlying dreams of getting a decent job, finding a lover, writing a novel etc but I sensed this wasn’t the kind of dreams she could help me with. So when she’d explained to me that I needed a dream, or dreams, that that was what my life was lacking and why I felt so aimless and lost, I blurted out that I wanted to travel across Europe and live by the sea – and maybe I mentioned writing, too.

The next stage was to construct one of those dream thingies, where you cut out images from magazines and what-not and stick them onto a big sheet of paper – except that this was 2011 and I did it virtually by finding images online and downloading them into a folder. I think I’ve probably still got that folder somewhere, might even be able to find it (or not).

PS I didn’t find it, but did find a random poem from around that time (or a bit later), which is equally appropriate today, although, bizarrely, it must have been written in Bedford (I seem to remember I was walking home from the swimming baths when it came to me):

A new day, and seagulls calling,
grey-white and lost against the clouds.
Water in air, mingling elements,
and I, pedestrian, earthbound.

Linda Rushby 9 November 2011
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Trying

I haven’t written for the last couple of days because I’ve been out. On Friday I went to Chichester, to an art exhibition which I’d been meaning to go to and when I finally got round to checking the gallery website on Wednesday I found out it finished today, so I booked a ticket for Friday. It was quite a grey and drizzly day, and apart from the exhibition I spent most of it sitting in a café, but at least I went, and had a damp walk round the Bishop’s Palace Gardens and took some photos.

Yesterday I did something I’ve been thinking about doing for ages, and psyching myself up for most of last week. A new book shop has opened since the summer, round the corner from the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sundays before the writers group meetings. The ‘psyching myself up’ part was to take my books and ask if they would stock them. I’ve been putting it off, so I thought I’d bribe myself by going out for breakfast first. On Wednesday I decided I would definitely go on Thursday, but when I woke up it was raining, and carrying a bag full of paperback books through the rain didn’t seem like such a good idea, and was enough of an excuse to back out of it.

But yesterday morning when I got up it was dry and bright, so despite the news about the lockdown, which was a perfectly good excuse, I steeled myself to do it. Passing the shop on the way to the café, I saw that they opened at ten. I got to the café about ten past nine, but although there were plenty of tables at that point, they were fully booked from 9:30 so couldn’t offer me a table. I walked around to find another café for breakfast, the first one I had in mind had a queue outside, so I kept going to an area where there are lots of cafes, and found a new one I hadn’t tried before. The service was a bit slow, but the food was good, I was quite happy till I looked out the window and realised it was pouring with rain. I checked the bus app to see if I could get a bus back to the book shop – there was one which would take me part of the way – or I could just get the normal one, going the other way, and go home. But it had become a mission, so I waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes, while two passed going the other way, then I gave up and walked through the rain back to the shop.

The lady in the shop was very nice, and we chatted for ages, but she didn’t want my books, especially with the news about the lockdown. Maybe some time in the future, whenever that might be. But at least I tried.

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Wednesday

Where do the words come from? Same old question. I’m not sure any will come at all today, I will just burble on about the daily battle with my cat for space on the desk to put the keyboard – I’ve made a lovely empty space to the right of the monitor, from where she can watch the street, or leap at the odd bluebottle battering itself against the glass. I found a silhouette of a bluebottle on the living room carpet the other day, spread out with its wings either side, like a cartoon character which has just been hit by a falling 50 ton weight. How did it get that way? I don’t remember smashing any recently, and I don’t think it would have come from the bottom of my shoe, so I suspect she has had a rare hunting success, though how such soft paws can apply such force is a mystery.

There’s a camper van parked directly across the street, a big beast, about three times the size of mine, parked across the fronts of two houses, and with a door halfway down the side. Thinking about it, maybe it’s only twice the size of mine, twice the length, anyway, though it might be wider… no, not even that, because it fits behind the dotted parking lines. I guess if you take off the cab, the living space is more than twice as big anyway. It seems to have been there a while – can’t remember when I first saw it. Maybe the owner is leaving it there for the winter. They’d have to be a resident of this parking zone to get a resident’s parking permit for it – you have to send a copy of the log book with the address on to get one (or possibly not now it’s all online). When I moved into this house there were no parking restrictions on this street, but since then the zoning system has been extended. I don’t have a permit for my van because I rent a garage for it from a friend who lives in a neighbouring road. The first winter I had it, when I was living in the flat, I kept it out on the street and it was broken into and my folding bike was stolen. It was very upsetting at the time. Bad things happen.

Speaking of which, I just moved my hand and accidentally whacked my cat in the face, so she has now slunk off to ‘her’ chair, a spare office chair which I keep next to the desk for her.

The website’s done (fingers crossed) and is waiting to be signed off and invoiced. And I have finally decided that the jumper is big enough to separate the sleeves. I hate wearing anything that’s too tight under the armpits (not that I’ll be wearing this one). It’s now on three circular needles (body and sleeves) with four balls of wool – looking forward to spending more time untangling than knitting.