Of love, life and art

Even I can't be entirely cynical about yesterday's royal wedding. It may have been overhyped and a transparent attempt to distract us plebs from real issues but I was just happy to see my taxes spent on promoting love instead of war. Fabulous dresses, outrageous headgear and we got an extra day off work - what's not to like? I might as well appreciate holidays while I can still take them - once I'm self-employed, a day off will mean a day of lost income or an all-nighter to follow. Going to task in the city (look it up) has the sort of advantages you don't appreciate until they're gone.

So we spent our day off (and indeed the wedding itself, much to my mother's horror) driving up to Sheffield to see our friend Mike, who has a barbeque for every occasion and specialises in tender brisket (which at least sounds wedding-related). A couple of friends were there who happen to be self-employed, so of course I took the opportunity to ask them about tax and accountants (I know how to get a party swinging). One does consultancy work via an agency; the other is a designer who has diversified. Neither is particularly inclined to return to the life of a corporate minion - and both evidently took the day off, so perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned. The key message was to take it all seriously - get the right insurance and pay the right tax. I think I can manage that.

Further inspiration followed today at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which I had never heard of and was slightly anxious about visiting, as it was 40 minutes in the wrong direction from home. But, as usual, submitting to The New was definitely the best choice and one that had already been made by everyone else as it seemed that the whole county had turned out to frolic in the art-strewn countryside. For us East Anglians lowlanders, even the hills were a revelation, sprinkled with the fresh greens of spring, and enhanced with the double pleasure of art.

That's not to say my cynicism was entirely smothered - while I'm happy to revel in the many metaphors of a meshwork viewing pavillion, I'm less inclined to call 71 wooden steps art, even if they were fashioned of burnished oak. That's just expensive landscaping. But I am still inspired: we only tackled a small proportion of the riches on offer so we will now be demanding a trip to sculptureland after every barbeque at Mike's. Every sense needs feeding after all.

Business planning for beginners

I'd pay my taxes for Business Link and the NHS alone. Unfortunately, both are shortly to be massacred in the public services cuts, but this isn't a political blog and I don't want to make any more enemies that I need to so I won't continue down that route. I've just come back from a Business Link business planning course - 6 hours of valuable advice for no direct cost at all (direct costs - you can see I was paying attention to the financial forecasting section). I am almost sufficiently inspired to stop entering competitions and get down to writing my business plan, to take my leap seriously and start swimming down the river instead of floating amongst the debris.

I admit that I'm wary of finance. I'd rather devise a brand and sign up to Twitter than compile profit and loss sheets - but if that's what it takes, I shall do it and so it willingly. I'm an advocate for admin and processes (or a bit geeky, as some people call it) so, once the numerical mists have cleared, I will no doubt channel my inner accountant and calculate my forecast net profit to the nearest penny. And I have a tax workshop at HMRC next week - happy days!

The best part of attending a course, though, even better than the free coffee and homemade cake, is meeting other delegates. Today they ranged from a florist to landscape gardeners to a funky designer to a man who wants to use horses for logging. Disparate businesses with a common goal - to make a go of it, to trust in ourselves to do what we want to do. Given that the government want to encourage enterprise (and what a meaningless term that is), it's odd that the funding to encourage us should be cut, forcing us online without the benefit of networking. Oops, I'm getting political again.

A final, and slightly depressing point. The course was good but the PowerPoint slides and handouts were badly produced. Poor punctuation, strange formatting, random capitalisation, all the usual things that I am convinced obstruct communication but, in reality, most people don't seem to notice. We were encouraged to research the market, not to make assumptions about what customers want - but what if they don't care about clear copy and consistent use of language? What if other businesses and their clients are quite happy to accept sub-standard communications that I feel undermine their message? How do I promote the benefits of my service to people who don't feel the benefits are worthwhile? Perhaps it's the case for every business - market yourself, push your USP - but in my field it seems to be particularly difficult to sell yourself.

The prize that's just around the corner

I read on a forum about someone who entered 17,000 competitions last year and won 83 prizes. First of all - 17,000?! When did they eat, sleep, look up, grey-faced and twitching from their laptop keyboard to acknowledge the real world? But we'll callously gloss over the addiction issues to consider the point that struck me even harder: where's the ROI on that? It's around a 0.5% success rate, hours and hours of completing online forms with personal details you wouldn't normally dream of handing out to a global conglomerate in order to receive a load of junk mail, just because of the slim chance you might win a whale-watching trip to Ireland or a gas-fuelled barbeque or bust-firming cream. Not that these are freebies that I'd turn down, and thus a few months ago I joined the comping ranks and can exclusively report that I too have a 0.5% success rate. I've entered around 400 competitions and won some cereal and a book of poetry. And before you scoff, it was a box of organic ginger flakes and the collected works of Seamus Heaney. A cut above, I'm sure you'll agree... but, yes, hardly a £5000 vintage bed (my personal favourite prize) or a brand new car. I'm working up to that.

And there's the problem. I call them competitions but the vast majority are prize draws (and I include in this category those that ask you to "answer the question below that we've already answered for you"). No skill is required, only luck and luck is just statistics. My marketing friends (who got me obsessed in the first place) assure me that not as many people enter competitions as you might expect, but clearly every other competitor reduces your own chances - and there are a lot of other obsessives out there (as the 17,000-a-year habit demonstrates). My husband tells me it's a mug's game, and of course it is - but one that plays on your dreams and aspirations, so is therefore one that gets you while you're down at the expense of promises to friends and associates, the business research I should be doing, the constructive ways of spending my spare time that are waiting for me. But it doesn't stop me - just one more, just until I win, just until I win again.

Choose your own cliche: Life is a gamble, you're always striving for the prize that never comes, enjoy what you've got, use your time wisely. All true, all wise, all easy to say and hard - so hard - to apply.

That difficult second post

So I've customised my template and downloaded an attractive yet metaphorical background. It had to be metaphorical because if you type "moon" or "twilight" into any given search engine, all you get is images of rather peaky teenagers taking themselves too seriously. So the vintage look was somewhat unplanned - like all the best discoveries.

My medium is words, not pictures. If, in typical blog style, I were to pass on a taste of my extensive homespun wisdom, it would be "accept your limitations but don't let them limit you." Which is less immediately useful than my other great life lessons ("When on a train, take the first free seat you see" and "The best things in life make your fingers smell") but it means I won't waste my time trying to develop a sophisticated design when it will take far longer than the 10,000 hours you're supposed to spend practising to become an expert at something. Yes, practise and practise until your fingers are numb, keep going, keep trying, keep on - but choose wisely. There are only so many hours in the day, and some of them need to be used eating and sleeping. As the mother of a toddler, sleeping doesn't feature particularly highly in my day, and eating featyuresprobably too highly, but once you deduct those, and working and driving and cooking and cleaning , there isn't all that much time for living. OK, so sleeping and eating and working and driving and cooking and cleaning are living, and can be enlightening and educational - but wouldn't you rather be doing something you've chosen to do?

Inspiration for the cynical

Hey there, little speedyheads. Join me in the river flow - come on in, it's warm in here.

Let's start with the basics. This blog's name is adapted from the REM song, "Find the River" (the last, glorious track on 1992's Automatic for the People, and therefore the last decent song they recorded). Google the lyrics and interpret them as you will, but I see it as a call to freedom, to escape from self-imposed rules , from the restrictions imposed by work or by society, to find your own way, to go with your own flow. 

Incidentally, my first choice of name for this blog was "Find the River" but it was claimed in 2003 by someone who made two entries in a language I can't read and never updated it again. Which turned out to be a fitting opportunity for me, not being blessed with any particular creative powers, to think a little laterally and find what turns out to be a far more inspirational name. 

And that's what I'll try to share. Calls to freedom are not my speciality. I'm pretty straight-laced, down-the-line, more train track than meandering stream. Cute husband (Mr B), cute daughter (Monkeyrina), house, car, job, blah. As my occasional C of E tendencies suggest, I'm not particularly spiritual, and I'm not inclined to warble on about chakras. I am cursed - blessed - cursed with an enquiring mind - I'm the sort of person who can't relax during a massage because I'm wondering why salons always assume you want to listen to pan-pipes while a stranger rubs your back. My idea of spontaneous is going to Morrisons instead of Tesco. My idea of daring is not typing an apostrophe before the S in Morrisons even though the omission is their brand style. My idea of a fun Saturday night is sitting beside Mr B, each with our laptops, as I write my blog.

So when the opportunity presented itself to look for new challenges (that's LinkedIn speak for being at risk of redundancy) I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for seizing them. The redundancy process is long and torturous, and I may not even manage to escape, but life is suddenly full of possibility, of painting and writing and dancing and being somewhere other than a badly lit office for 8 hours a day while the world spins on. 

More prosaically, I also have to pay the mortgage, so self-employment as a freelance proofreader / copy editor / copywriter / enquiring minder seems to be an option for at least some of my time.

So where does the inspiration come in? Once you start to look,  it is there in every imaginable form (remember, my imagination is a little, well, little). Sometimes it comes to you, as song, a phrase, a person. Sometimes it is brought to you, by a friend with a book or a blog. And sometimes you have to go out and find it.

So share the journey with me. Let's find the river and cast our dreams into the flowing water.

This is where I should insert an arty photo of a rising moon. But that would be too predictable. And I don't have one. So here's another wonder of nature - the inside of a tulip. It's included not just a shameless excuse for showing a photo I'm proud of taking (it's in focus and everything) but, close up, tulips don't look quite as you'd expect them to, do they? Rawer, more exposed. Hmm, I feel a metaphor coming on.