Whilst at an outdoor food fair in Cromer ( it was excellent by the way, Yeh,! Second PokeNom in two weeks ) I came across a stall selling fancy food products for dogs with the great name of - Dog Only Nose
Saturday 27th May
Another weekend, another Bank Holiday. This week has more than usual, been emotionally a tough one. Both of us mentally tense, perhaps over sensitive, low in morale. I do wonder quite what state we'll be in by the end of the 2023 Summer season. As we move deeper into it, we work more days a week. Moving from five to six to seven. The latter starting in mid July and ending in mid Sept with the ridiculous pantomime that is The 1940's Weekend. From then it goes into rapid reverse moving from seven to six back to five days in short measure.
After that rather emotionally stressful week we've been talking about a short holiday before the peak season begins. This would not be great timing shop wise. There is an inbuilt tyranny to running a shop dependent on maximising sales in the summer. Would it be better to wait til Sept/Oct for our holiday is a genuine question? We haven't been able to afford a holiday for two years now. We've arranged to take money out of my pension pot simply in order to enable that to happen sometime this year.
Oh, yeah, there is my pension. This begins to kick in from the end of June. Potentially, at least, this maybe be a game changer with regard to the shops viability. Moving us from just about scraping breaking even to ideally making money we put back into our bank account. We must wait and see how the reality pans out. With the government thinking that an itsy bitsy recession might be a price worth paying, if it stops inflationary profiteering in our food manufacturers and providers. Who knows where we will be by the Autumn? There is an argument to be made, to wait and see what circumstances have arisen. A holiday away from it all might needed should we be reconsidering our future direction by then.
Sunday 28th May
Now the miniature shrine for Our Lady of Walsingham is finished. I've set too on a larger scale shrine building project. When we recently re-organised the craft room it involved dismantling the shrine I had in there. So this has meant a major rethink. I've designed and started the construction of a shrine base to slip over a storage heater that we never use. It feels as though I've come full circle. This has echoes of my very first shrine, which I perched decorously on top of a lavatory cistern. Maybe I should have seen this as a portent. Beginning my meditative career with any spiritual merit I'd earned, literally going down the pan.
Its worthy of note, that I've found immense amounts of enthusiasm and satisfaction from my shrine building. Something I've not experienced with craft making in quite some time. As was ever so, I cannot give this project sufficient time. But it is, nonetheless, making steady progress. As I complete a stage, what I'd like it to look like by the end keeps developing. I am hoping engaging with the making of this shrine may also help in reconnecting me with a daily meditation practice. This ceased about six months ago with no drama, in fact pretty much no fanfare at all. And considering how tricky my mental states have been lately, perhaps a rapprochement in that unforced separation, requires effort.
I've begun reading a Haruki Murakami novel - 1Q84. Originally published in Japan in three parts, I'm reading it in a trilogy compendium volume of over nine hundred pages. It does, as you can imagine require some heft. It is truly an unweildy book even in paperback. It was Hubby's originally, but he found it hard to complete as a novel. Getting eighty pages from completion before exasperation set in. Currently I'm about two hundred pages in and still enjoying it. But physically it is not a comfortable book to hold when reading. Its not for nothing I refer to it as 'The Brick'.
Having completed the Nico biography, I had a resurgence of interest in her distinctly sombre oeuvre. I once possesed a vinyl copy of her album The End. I think it fell prey to one evening in the 1980's which I spent with friends cathartically smashing my vinyl LP collection into tiny bits with hammers. I think at the time I was into purging my record collection of music I thought aberrant at the time. How my views have changed. From my view today, The End does have an apocalyptic sonic magnificence to it. But, do not listen to it if you are a bedsitter depressive, it will not at all help in cheering you up. It possess a form of beauty best appreciated briefly when you need to touch the depths a little, but not stay there long enough to drown.
Monday 29th May
In complete contrast to Nico's joyless, but no doubt cathartic, dwelling on tragedy and loss, Sparks have released a new album this weekend. I'll review it more fully at a later date. But a couple of listens through confirms it to be rather an exceptional one. The usual bright, witty, innovative songs, yet with quite a strong undertow of poignancy conjured up quite often out of sparse lyrical details.
This May Bank Holiday, the weather has cooled and clouded over. The chilly breeze, after a day or so of respite, has returned to slice the edge off any warmth. Takings so far have been muted, but OK. Its also half term in the coming week. So if you are a holidaymaker you still have a few days left yet to eek your meagre funds over. There are a lot of folk here, but there's a cautiousness in the air, you can almost smell it.
Wednesday 31st May
It's proved to be rather a good end of the month trading for us. May is 10% up on last year, very nearly back to our best May's takings in 2021. The additional Coronation Bank Holiday obviously helped, but I think we've also got a good range of stock at the right price point. The average spend going down by 13% whilst the number of sales increased by 26%. Which means we are broadly getting more sales of smaller value items. In the current economic climate I think this should probably be called an achievement. We'd do well to remember this in future moments when resilience begins to flag.
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