SHERINGHAM DIARY NO 44 - 3 Tiers to 3 Phases & Back Again

1st Phase - Mothballing Your Work 

Once the shop was closed, yet again, it released a certain amount of gleefulness. Like at the end of school term. Finally we could see ourselves getting off the shop focused making treadmill for a while. One we'd been on pretty much solidly since after our January holiday in Malton. Restarting our daily walks in the woods, parks, along the sea promenades we are so fortunate to be surrounded by.

But first there was a bit of practical catching up, those tertiary tasks that kept falling off the to do list. Tidying up the garage, sorting out the workshop ( which had got into yet another mess of my own making ) plus starting to rebuild our website on a new platform.  These sound such minor things as I write them. But the first week was full of these small satisfying reliefs.  I don't think either of us realised why and how much they weighed down upon our sense of brio, but they did.

It also provided the time to refine my knitting technique of tawashi face scrubbies, I'm sure you are all delighted to hear. Made a couple of swish mirrors, more back up coaster stock. If your little brain cells are ticking over right now, wondering quite  how this was getting off the shop focused making treadmill. Well it was planned; our making is focused better when we aren't also minding the shop, and it was our way of clearing out our desks before a 'holiday' break. Once the website was moved with a basic range of stock on it, we planned to stop and create a breathing space.

2nd Phase - Holidaying At Home

I don't know what we expected from our nine day 'staycation', at home. A holiday where you don't stray far from where you live all the time, why would that be problematic? Well, for sure, its never going to rejuvenate like a stay in another part of the country, away from the same old same old. So it started with not knowing quite what the space we had now opened up was for.

The tendency, initially, was - for goodness sake fill it with another form of making, busyness or task. Plug the existential gap left by eschewing working on shop stock. We put ourselves at a bit of a loss, until we decided doing nothing much was actually more than good enough. Jnanasalin compared it to going on solitary retreat with ideas in your head what you might do, but on arrival finding you're not interested in 'doing' full stop. This leaves you a bit adrift with emotions and stuff roughly unpacking themselves for a while. But if you keep your nerve, then low, a state of relaxation is born in the land of Boris. A less driven sense of ourselves emerged from the swamp. That unproductive lazy retard that lives happily repressed within us all.

Benefiting from just slobbing around for a while. There was loads to be grateful for, the walks, having time to cook, lighting a fire of an evening, reading poetry, watching emotionally engaging TV programmes like Ambulance or Hospital. And if things got too heart rending there was always Only Connect and Nigella decadently stuffing her face on camera for light relief. 

Loving the Steve McQueen Small Axe movies. The fabulous Big Scottish Book Club continues reigniting my interest in reading books. 

I found reading Damian Barr's childhood memoir Maggie & Me immensely satisfying. His writing style so deceptively simple, as it deftly slips from light humorous reminiscence to a darker more distressing abuse event often within the space of a paragraph. What a difficult upbringing.

As we entered the final weekend before we return to making, there was a bit of anticipatory tension in the air. 

3rd Phase - As You Were, Gentlemen.

On our first day returning to making shop stock, there was the recognisable whiff of reluctance to re-engage, plus the caution not to return to our state before the holiday, as if it were some default. Our first day back largely consisted of a trip over to Wells-next-the-sea to pick up a new batch of our Cottonwood soap stock, wiggling in a walk around the Holkham Estate to transform it into a health benefit. Then back to our shop in Sheringham to drop off the soap and pick up stock to photograph for the website.

This set the tone for the ten days to follow, purposeful but bitty, a little stab of making, a dash of photography followed by the necessary follow through on shop set up practicalities. Neither of us is ever short of things to do, though we haven't finished as much as we'd hoped. At one point having to scale back my ambitions for what I could feasibly achieve, as I'd suddenly felt over whelmed and oppressively weighed down by it all.

As a result of watching The Big Scottish Book Club, I appear to be buying books that are a grim recounting of working class Scottish upbringings. Following the Damian Barr memoir with the Henry Miller like Greek tragedy unfolding in Douglass Stuart's Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain. I'm only in the opening chapters, but so far I'm really impressed with it.

And so the month of lock down came to an end, reversing all we put in place just a month ago. Re-merchandising the shop floor, putting in our Christmas window and the next day reopening. How will that reopening go? Who the hell knows? I try to travel empty handed, prepare to be unprepared, ready to respond well towards whoever walks in and whoever walks by. I frequently fail in this. Its a practice that is far from perfected.