SHERINGHAM DIARY No 98 - Near & Yet So Far

November has been truly the shittiest month in the shop. A combination of terrible and consistently wet stormy weather and the dire economic climate, creating a huge amount of uncertainty and reservation in the public about spending any money at all. We are already deep deep deep into recession, have no doubt.

If it wasn't clear enough before, it is now. We've made the right call in deciding to get out of High St retailing. And whilst that is true, we still have weeks to go before we hand the keys back. From our present point, all I can say is, its turning out to be an endurance test, a bit of a slog, at lot more emotionally challenging than we expected. I'm having to get accustomed to managing an increased amount of muscular knots of tension in my body. The like of which I haven't felt in quite some time.

We are living 'in between worlds' what Buddhism refers to as a bardo. These are places where what is to come is not yet here, whilst what has been, and still is here, has not yet fully gone. It can be quite painful living in the moment of a bardo, impatience and anxiety can arise. Impatience with what you want to see the back of, coupled with anxiety simply about what has not yet arrived, what will that be?,what will it be like? what will we have to face?

So the low hanging fruit of uncertainty is here, even whilst we have more than enough to do in the meantime, thank you. I had the feeling this week of keeping too many plates spinning. We have a garage that is, as yet, nowhere near ready for holding all the stock and storage we will need to run markets and online from. My workshop is such a tip I have to prise myself in there. We are making steady progress with photographing stock and getting it onto the website. The book keeping for the self assessment tax return at the end of January - well, I just can't face that. There is a clearance sale to organise and a possible craft fair in two weeks time. All taking place whilst we are still running the shop, doing half day shifts, to, frankly, make the tedium of it bearable. At some point the Christmas decorations have to go up. Plus keeping on top of our making of stock to sell. Buying materials etc. Understandably, our planning has been a tad improvisatory.

Selling online is a less forgiving environment, when it comes to making of items. Things have to be more standardised across ranges. A shop can accommodate slight inconsistencies, past variations in making, online cannot. Doing the photography for the website, has hence thrown up a few challenges, having to attend to consistency issues for online.

Moving towards the clearance sale has encouraged a focus on clearing out deadwood, cutting back to the basics. Once we started to think about what might go in our final clearance sale, its actually a very limited range of items. Primarily other makers stuff we are not going to be taking to the markets or online. 

We are already in conversations with our candle maker to make a bespoke range for us, and with our soap maker to revamp our packaging to create a simpler market style. A couple of places have indicated they'd like to feature some of our stock. There is a lot going on behind the scenes. As you can no doubt imagine we are both too tense and stressed out at present, to be looking forward to our future finishing date. That still seems far far away.