Tuesday 17th July 2007

Oh I've had a busy day today. I got up quite early, because I had to go into town - I had shopping to do, irritating shopping like a bottle of shower cleaner, which I had inexplicably forgotten to buy when I did my big once-a-month shop - very frustrating. But mostly I was going in to town to meet up with some work friends, in particular Nina, because she had agreed to 'model' some earrings for me.
I'd been having chats with some fellow jewellery makers, and we've been discussing which is better for the sale of jewellery - jewellery that's worn by a model, or jewellery that's photographed plain on a clear, or display background. I thought I would do a little market research, as one of my friend's calls it - I've made two identical pairs of earrings, and I've photographed one on a stand, and the other has very kindly been modelled by Nina from work. I have to say that she's a pretty girl, with that lovely golden skin tone, so she makes the earrings look very good! Anyhow, I'm going to put them both on Ebay, completely identical listings except for the fact that one has the pics with Nina wearing the earrings, and the other has the plain photo. We'll see then which attracts the most people to look at, and if it makes any difference to the price - I'm very sceptical of it making much of a difference to be honest. I started out thinking, no one wants to buy earrings that have been worn by someone, but then I thought, well it's not like I haven't given them a swab with alcohol rub, and then we got chatting about it briefly in the office. Opinion there was fairly firm that it wouldn't make any sort of a difference, and that they might be more attracted to the 'modelled' picture. If it does make a dramatic difference, my heart sinks at the idea of having to find people willing to model earring after earring! It might be fun as a one off, but I think people would tire of it very quickly, and I'd become a total pain constantly begging people to model for me!

Anyhow, as a matter of interest, I found this poll thingy this week, so you tell me what you think, would you be more interested in buying earrings that you'd seen someone wearing, or would you prefer plain photo's? Nip over to the left, and you'll find a quick vote!

So after the office I headed back off into town - to do a bit of grocery shopping, and catch the bus home - and I wasn't half way to Tesco's before the sky opened and we had an absolute downpour. We'd had a shower half an hour earlier or so, but this was incredible - no preliminary drops, or any kind of warning, just literally dry one second, downpour the next. The roads were awash, like rivers torrentially pouring - just outside of House of Fraser, were the pavement slopes downward to the road, was a - well a river is about the best word I can think of. Extraordinary - I'd've taken photo's except my camera was in my backpack, and I had to manage the umbrella which I found at the bottom of my bag! Which I might add was being blown inside out every few seconds or so! So I was very wet by the time I got home, shoes, jeans - just yuch! Don't you hate it when you get so wet that you start to steam???

Still it's late, and I'm for bed. Night night all...

Tuesday 10th July - I think!

The reason for the 'I think' is because I've been on night shifts again! I'm recovered, that is I've slept and eaten and am pretty back to normal, except I can't remember what day of the week it is!

I've been so busy over the last few days. I've sold a lot out of my Ebay store, so it's get that all packed up, and rush it off to the Post Office - quick, because there's another strike on Thursday and Friday. Not that I wouldn't be rushing off to the PO anyway, I like to get things off and gone asap. It's like a sort of an internal itch, I just don't feel comfortable when I know there's people waiting for stuff and I've got to get it to them. It really bugs me.

And the latest Thursday Next novel arrived - oh, let me see, Friday I think. It's called the Mother of All Sequels, and I'm sorry to say it doesn't really live up to the Eyre Affair, or the Well of Lost Plots. But even though it doesn't reach these ecstatic heights, it's pretty damn good, better than much else around. Although - and this is really odd, I actually found The Fourth Bear was a better read. And that's odd, because I wasn't so keen on the Big Over Easy. I think it's because at that point I was desperate to read more of the Thursday Next sequence, so being forced off them, because at that point there were no more Thursday Next novels to read until this one was published, I kind of - well, I didn't invest in it as much as I should have. When I re-read it later, yep I was right there with the crazed inventiveness of this man (Jasper Fforde) and I have really enjoyed The Fourth Bear. But Mother of All Sequels is missing something, and I know exactly what it is for me, personally speaking. It's set in way too normal a world. There's only two tiny little pieces about Pickwick, the now bald dodo, when the knitting of her new teacosy style jumperette (she's lost her feathers poor dear) could have been a constant source of fun. But most of all, there's no stunning new piece of technology. In all of the past novels, there's been a source of wonder. The gravitubes, the airships, the bookworld awards, the Pro-Caths, (yes, I know this means absolutely nothing to you if you've not read these books!) Pagerunners and Evacuation Hats - all of that seems to be missing. They get their mention of course, but that's all it is, a fleeting mention. There's masses of stuff about the Imaginotransference engines (this is the mechanism by which the contents of a book are moved into a person's mind) but an engine's an engine, and frankly, not really my bag. On top of this, the character of Friday didn't grab me either, and the pain, the intense sorrow for Thursday and the mindworm planted into her by Aornis is just too terrible. It almost turns a brilliantly light comedy sequence into tragedy, it's a darkening of the story that is the more awful because it's unresolved. Presumably it's intended to be resolved in the next book, and it does look like there will be a next book at the end, because the whole thing is oddly unresolved, but personally I feel like he almost had trouble writing this one. The Fourth Bear flies off the page, trips over itself in it's joy and delight, but this - I don't know. It doesn't shamble, it's sprightly enough, but there's something missing from this that's there in the first four books.

Which leaves you asking if you're a writer, should you force yourself to continue with something if the spontaneity of it has gone for a while? I reckon he should have given himself another year, maybe two or three before writing this. It's got a forced-ness about it that speaks more of publisher's deadlines and contracts than anything else, and I'd really rather wait for the very best to come, than suffer a lurch in appreciation. Do you know what I mean? Maybe I'm just being fussy, and maybe most of all what this is really about is that I was looking forward to it so much, that the book had an almost impossible task to perform - to live up to my expectations. Because I hadn't got so involved in the Jack Spratt series, it delighted me because I was surprised. With the Mother of All Sequels, I was constantly waiting for the laugh out loud moment, and it never came. Expectation can be a deadly thing. It's like the next album of a favourite band that you end up never playing after the first time you listen to it, you'd just rather listen to the old favourite again. The fact you have to go out and buy another copy of whatever your favourite film is, rather than watch the latest version at the flicks. Expectation is awful, because it lets you down. We're rather odd creatures at times, aren't we?

Sunday July 1st, 2007

This weeks big news is the arrival of my new Mannequin. I suppose it shouldn't be a capitol M, but it feels like it should be - particularly if you consider the size of box it arrived in! Huge it was, and I had to go to the local post office to collect it - luckily it was light enough to be able to carry home, but boy it was a big awkward parcel to carry. And it's a big deal for me, and my photography, but frankly it's not the sort of thing that would sustain a conversation for very long, so I'll take this opportunity to put a few photo's on here - then you can look at it, and go yes, very nice, and we can move on to something a bit more - well, frankly, conversational!!!

These three necklaces are made with pendants made by Joan Tucker of Offcentre Productions. They're wonderful ceramic pieces, with wonderful colours. She sent them to me to make into necklaces, and I've got them on sale in my Etsy shop if you'd like to go and have a look - I've got some more close up photo's on there. If you've got someone with a birthday coming up, one of these would make a great present! And of course, you're buying something unique - you can find more of Joan's wonderful pendants on her website. The link is:

http://www.offcenterproductions.com/

and she's got a blog at http://offcenterproductions.blogspot.com/, where you'll find lots of really interesting jewellery and pieces to look at.

So what about the weather then? I say this purely to those of us living in the UK, were we have been deluged by highly unusual floods in what's supposed to be summer. Mind you I say highly unusual, frankly, given the UK's weather particularly over the last few years, there's nothing really unusual about it at all. And considering Wimbledon started this week, frankly we should have been expecting it. What you don't quite expect to happen is for it to come two or three feet at a time, and to hang around. Personally speaking in Bristol, we've just had rain without the floods, but a bit up river - and up north, they've almost been expecting an ark to come floating around the corner. You've got to feel sorry for people when their entire lives are soaked and stinking - you can't remember to grab everything as you head out of the house for the community centre where no doubt the WI are handing out mugs of tea as if it was WWII all over again. Best you can hope for really is your youngest and the cat. The loss of the photograph album and the medical certificates, the really important stuff, it doesn't really sink in until maybe a day or so later. And then you suddenly catch yourself thinking of that stupid letter that your first boyfriend wrote to you when you were fourteen and spotted to hell and back - the fact that you've not spoken to him for twenty years, like as not not even thought of him for most of that time, and he's happily married and living in wherever is irrelevant. It's the loss of your past that's important, the pieces of paper that make the bricks and morter of your life, and you expected to pass on to your daughter at some time. Either that, or take to the nursing home with you. If your daughter consigns it to the bonfire, well that's not important. The immature efforts at poetry that rhymed and scanned, puerile as it was, that's what's important. Maybe because when you were fourteen, it made you float down the streeet and essentially, validated your existence. The fact that two week's later you were no longer speaking to him is equally irrelevant!

The only other thing I wanted to blog about is poor old Pogle. I was posting all these photo's of him the other week on Flickr, and he was pretty much his normal self at the time - but all of a sudden he's gone and got diabetes! He lost so much weight, and got all sleepy and stuff, and it turns out he's got diabetes. Since this, he's been put on to insulin - he started off at one injection a day, but now he's up to two. Apart from his lost weight, he looks pretty much as normal - except oddly the russet is showing much more prominently in his fur. Funny that, he's pretty much a marmalade cat up til now, and suddenly he's turning into a red head! Of course the thing about Pogle is that he's a wanderer, and likes to supplement his - and our diets, with the odd mouse or bird. Exactly how you keep a cat like that on a diabetic diet heaven only knows. And so far we haven't even discovered whether we can cook him a bit of chicken or tuna and feed it to him. Our vet has been a big pusher of 'diabetic cat food' which is costing a fortune natch - and we've had to make special space in the fridge for the bottles of insulin! Well I say we, I mean Martin of course. Jo has had to teach him how to inject the cat - he won't take pills. Still he's struggling on, and hopefully Poges will adjust. It's been a dreadful thing to happen, he's still a moderately young cat, and he was very fit and healthy before all this. You'd think if one of the cats was going to get sick, it'd be Jake who's getting on in years. Ah well, I must go, Supernatural's starting and I want to see what happens next!