SHERINGHAM DIARY No 106 - Salutary Lessons

All the best shops have names that are either evocative of a quality, self explanatory, or enjoy a bit of extravagant word play. You may have already seen adverts for this company online,  called -  

SHUTTERLY FABULOUS. 

I bet the person who came up with that one loudly squealed and was very pleased with themselves, for more than a minute or two.

I keep by my bed a small plastic statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. After only a few minutes in strong light it will glow quite brightly for hours afterwards. Its 'magically" impregnated with luminous chemicals. It's a piece of religious ephemera simultaneously reverential and ridiculous. I am curiously very fond of it. I keep it underneath my bedside lamp, and if I should wake in the night, how brightly it glows indicates whether the night is still young or not. 

In my general tossing and turning during sleep, its quite common to shift my pillow and knock the Virgin to the floor, with the resulting pronounced clatter. This happened the other night. Hubby was sound asleep with only the suggestion of a light snore coming up from my right side. I moved the pillow, the virgin fell down wards, Hubby woke briefly and brightly said - ' morning' - and fell instantly back into light snoring.

Its the end of our third month post the shop. We now have three stockists of our handmade goods, up and running. One at Cottage Crystals & Beads in Sheringham, another at Seagulls & Samphire in Blakeney. And a couple of weeks ago we took stock to a craft shop, Studio Designs in Wells next the Sea. 

For the time being we're holding off on putting our stock anywhere else. Blakeney in particular looks like it will be demanding a lot of our time in the coming season, just keeping it well stocked. At present the making is a bit hand to mouth. So, until we have better back up stock, we are pausing taking on any further stockists.

Starting doing regular market stalls would also be akin to us opening another shop. So we may only undertake a few markets this year. As we move towards the summer season, we are having to maintain a focus of being practical and cautious. Bearing in mind Hubby also has a part time job to keep up with too.

Myself? Well I'm trying to find the right balance between - making for the business - being available to support Hubby where I can - with getting a grasp on this amorphous idea of being part time retired. Having spent most of my life being externally demand led, I'm having to learn how to be more internally self motivated. Not particularly skilled at this yet

.

This last week provided me with a salutary lesson. I strained a bit too hard during a swimming session. The hips and lower back the next day were extremely sore and inflamed. The strain of managing this made me extremely tired, very quickly. It has taken a good ten days for it to settle down. My capacity for pushing the boat out physically has revealed my current parameters.

Having some personal projects of my own, outside of Cottonwood, is proving essential. I'm well over half way into a knitting project of a sleeveless jumper. My painting archive requires attention conservation wise.  As the days get warmer, more of them I intend to spend outside in the garden, garage or workshop. It will also soon be time to start my 'church larking' again. I have exciting ideas for where to take myself off to this year. 

We attended a knitting group the other week. It was held in a high end yarn shop. So we were surrounded by racks of twirled skeins of hand dyed, hand spun yarns, costing a pretty penny for a mere 100gms. We sort of expected the knitters might likewise be well healed, and they did not disappoint.

I'm always impressed by women's facility to talk and knit simultaneously. If I try this I make mistakes constantly. There is also a very noticeably female power dynamic. Women can appear to be being helpful, whilst also being subtly undermining. One woman, who was a relatively inexperienced knitter, was obviously very proud of herself for daring to pull back and start again on a complicated patterned jumper. She was showing us her much improved second attempt. To which one lady declared 'You realise, of course, there is a way you could have done it much better on the back'. 

These were all independent women not short of a bob or two, so the subject matter was choice. The discussion explored the rapacious capacity of the Muntjac deer to ruin your roses. 'You should try having 500 trees' countered another, in a sort of proprietorial one upwomanship. One woman talked of the practicalities of setting up a preservation trust, to save the town's architectural heritage. Plus the difficulties of maintaining a flat in Knightsbridge. 

Then there came one woman's disapproval of a company that produced supposedly Eco bamboo toilet rolls, and finding out they're only 4% bamboo. As she'd invested in boxes and boxes of the stuff, she was absolutely livid. Going to contact the management to express her indignation at being sold such an eco porker. I found this simultaneously amusing. fascinating to watch, and alienating. This little knitting group was on entirely another planet. We will not be returning.