Websites

I found yesterday that there are a number of initiatives out there at the moment to help small British businesses start up. In the wake of the recession and the ever increasing mass redundancies that seem to stain our perfect British world, the Government has seen fit to help out a little to ensure that people in the UK make their own money from now on because the state are not going to help anymore.

The two websites that I discovered were www.startupbritain.co.uk and www.gbbo.co.uk. The latter provides the opportunity to get a website up and running for free with your choice of .co.uk names (as long as their available) This is exactly what I've been looking for to get my site up and running. The edit functionality is not great, so it will look a little like a website from the mid-90's but at least it's a shop window, even if that window is behind the high street in-between a second-hand bookstore and an adult entertainment shop.

I will launch the website shortly once I have played around with it a bit, and post the address on here.

Location:Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

Home Moan

The night before, I'd been shivering in the pub, whilst downing my fourth pint, but when I woke up on Friday morning I knew I was rough. You know that feeling that comes to you straight away when you begin to think of the things that you were meant to do during the day ahead. They were all a write off, no way could I roll into work the way I felt now.

I sunk back in to the pillow and cursed my head and my aching legs for falling apart the way that they had. Was this not the body that you were meant to take for granted, and carried you through your life without any issue or crisis. Pathetic.

Since we've had children running around, picking up bugs, infiltrating other children and generally carrying disease, like rats in the Great Plague, or pigeons in a crowded City Square, we've been picking up these annoying little bugs and viruses.

The gradual onset of day brought with it the realisation that we had to prepare the house for a viewing from some more ditherers. I looked over at Claire, hoping that she would be the valiant white knight that would come riding over the hill and save me, and all I saw was this swollen, reddy, lump lying next to me making an odd noise resemblant of the noise the air makes when let out of a lilo at speed.

Terrific. Together we're going to have to pull through this one and make a show home standard home and take the kids to school etc.

But as champions do, and heroes of the old school do, and pillars of things do, we battled through successfully and reached the eventual result of a super clean home by 4pm. We were helped massively in this success by the nemesis of clean houses being invited to a friends house to play for the afternoon, which gave us a clear run.

At four hourly intervals, the time when we would gather in the kitchen to take our drugs, I would say it was comparable to feeding time in the penguin enclosure, but unfortunately it was more like Sid and Nancy at the Methadone clinic.

We vacated the house in time for the ditherers to make their inspection, as we like to create some sort of suspense. So we never know the appropriateness of the reviewer. Saturday morning, however, readily informed us that the family with three children thought that it was a lovely house but the garden was not big enough. Duhh...

It doesn't have a garden, it has a yard, it is clearly stated everywhere and our inept agents must even know that much about the product they're trying to sell. So, surprise, surprise, another waste of time. I wonder if this is not an elaborate means of someone ensuring that we clean our house within an inch of it's life every week.

What's made the house sale even more exciting now is that next door has decided that he wants to put his on the market as well. Not only does this portray an image of rats leaving a sinking ship and conjuring up illusions of the road going to the dogs, but also the natural factors of his house versus ours.

He lives somewhere in Eastern Europe now and has rented his house for the last five years, mostly to a pleasant, quiet guy in his forties. But the inside of his house unfortunately looks like a cross between one of the honeymoon suites in Auschwitz and Kevin Spacey's room in Seven.

The discerning purchaser would have to spend a considerable amount of money on just making sure that you didn't infect yourself every time you went to the bathroom, let alone the usual home improvements that one would make, cellar for bodies, love swing, human cannonball etc...

The value that has been put on his house is low, 13% less than ours, and given the nervous market currently and the perception of house prices in general, this is not the best news that we could've had. It just gets better and better. (this is sarcastic by the way)

On the positive side though, we could be living next door to Colonel Gadaffi, and that would make it really hard to sell.

Location:London Rd,Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

Two Million Dollar Baby

What could two million pounds get you? It would be an ideal lottery win, you would have enough to sort loved ones out before taking the rest on a dream life.

I once did a calculation to work out my Financial Independence figure. This was the sum of an appropriate annual salary factored by an appropriate interest rate for however many years you want to earn it, a house, a car, some big holidays, a snooker room, a swimming pool and what ever else you can see yourself achieving before you die. Add all of this up and there is the amount that you need to gather to live that perfect life. Nothing special but control over the rest of your days. My figure came out at 1.3 million.

What about a commercial building project, or two Rickie Lamberts?

The reason I ask this is because the part of the project that I have been working on for the last 18 months has now gone live in Production. The total cost is up near two million.

You wouldn't know that it was there, the business are now using it and this equates to one person who I'm shadowing to make sure he does it right. I won't go into the mind-numbingly boring details about exactly what it does but suffice it to say that it helps to support a new Financial IS System.

I suppose the money is only one aspect of the project but it does help to put context on to it. The project was one twenty-fifth of the total Programme Budget, so this shows how much certain people really care about it.

So, like a big, fat gypsy that has been turfed off of his site, or a hat and scarf combo on the first day of Spring, I'm now redundant in my task. Oh, how I wish I was proclaiming that I was redundant full stop but alas, no.

I'll still be in employment for the time being but my actual responsibilities are massively reduced. I obviously don't want to show too much appetite for anything new, so instead I will bide my time.

The end of this month is the date that I'm still expecting more news on that front, so in the mean time, which is only a couple of weeks, I'll just keep my head down and wait.

Don't forget that the dream ticket is to work on transition work until the end of June and then Va Va Voom.

Just to think that Saints could've bought two more Rickie Lambert's instead.

Location:Arderne Pl,Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

Choose Life

Why doesn't anyone make decisions like the ones that you see in the movies? For instance, the gangster style bag of money that would be carried around by the expectant buyer and on having all of their boxes ticked on a new purchase, would leave the said bag on the side, saying something like, "It's all there, don't bother counting it," and the vendor would shake his head in disbelief and fear. Job done. Deal. Money in the bank.

Instead in today's climate, heaven forbid anyone to make a decision that was spontaneous. A knee jerk action that maybe one day they would regret, but to hell with it, let's live in the moment. Rock n' Roll.

I'm talking about the house for a change. We had a young couple come round viewing it on Thursday and the reaction from the agent was all very positive. They absolutely loved the house, were blown away by how good it looked (thanks to Claire cleaning it to palace standard) but as they were only at the beginning of their search they wanted to make sure of what else was around.

This may still be good, they will come back to us and plead with us on bended knee to forget their earlier misgivings and sign the dotted line. But, for goodness sake, it's a three bedroom terraced house. What else do they look like? We've got the best example of one in a five mile radius. There's even a blue plaque on the outside explaining that a member of Aura4 once lived there.

My theory, and I will confess that it's not based on much, is that property programmes are killing the house market. Every week the masses watch these brainless, no-hopers try and get a house, and the main reason that they are on the programme is that they've been looking for a house for two years and have been round 350 different houses and they just can't seem to find the right one. We then get taken around the best houses in the Cotswolds and they still don't bloody buy one because the second orchard doesn't have the right pears in it.

This doesn't mean that I think people are holding off for a picture postcard cottage in the mountains, on the beach, near a city, with no one nearby. But I do think that people are aware of the choice more than before, and choice is a bad thing.

If you went into a restaurant that had "Full English - £5" on the window then you would walk in and order the breakfast and enjoy it. When you're presented with the menu you're all of a sudden torn between the traditional breakfast, the eggs benedict, the simple scrambled eggs on toast, or the bacon bap. In your mind you visualise them all, and they're all good but you know that you have to pick one. Then when your Traditional breakfast finally arrives at your table your mind is obsessed with the ones that got away. Instead of enjoying the variety and wholesomeness of the English, you wish that you'd gone for the lightness of the Benedict. A life of misery ensues and you're reminded of your terrible decision in every child's smiling face forever, until finally you die a miserable person eaten away by the decisions that have haunted you. You become a withered, decrepit, grey, ashen, hunched excuse for a person, and then you die. You were thirty five.

So, this is my advice to the unknowing buyer of my house, go with the flow a bit more. Are you happy with all of the elements of my house? Can you see yourself living there happily? Are you content that it won't fall down this year? And can you afford it? If all of this adds up, then don't worry if the grass is greener somewhere else, concentrate on the good things of what's in front of you, and take a risk. That's what life's about. Taking risks and some of them paying off, and the ones that don't are called experience and this makes you take better risks later on.

We shall see what happens with this latest bunch of ditherer's, but it'll turn out right in the end. It always does.

Location:London Rd,Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

Success... well...

I have received the first couple of letters back from the literary agents that I had sent samples of my book to. One was a flat rejection letter, "Thank you but no thank you, good luck." But the other has had a profound effect on my confidence.

Don't misunderstand me it wasn't an acceptance letter, but if Carlsberg did rejection letters, then this would be it.

It was fantastic because it was a hand written letter that was all good, apart from the important bit. There were phrases like, "... strong writing...", "I read the whole sample and enjoyed it...", one of the best comments, "It was very P.G.Wodehousian, which is one of the best complements that you can give a humour writer", "I'm probably making a huge mistake but ...".

These comments from someone that has been in the trade for forty years and knows something about all of this have blown my mind. Not only is it being treated like a proper book, which is comforting, but also that it's pretty good, which has done wonders for the old confidence.

I've written the book in a bunker really, with no real gauge of the quality, so this confirmation that it's alright is personally great.

I'm still waiting for two letters to come back and then I will send the next wave out to some unwitting agents, who are about to get their socks blown off.

We have a viewing on Thursday evening which is good. Some more hope on the house front. I'm going to try something this time. A little subliminal messaging around the house, that leaves a suggestion that it's home and that they belong there. It won't harm anything and, who knows, it might work.

The final thing that's happened this week is that I've heard news of my bonus that I'm paid at work. My expectations after last year were low, but I've been happily surprised and I should have enough money now to complete my Master Practitioner training for NLP. This training is completely aligned with what I want to achieve for my own business when I get to the Isle of Wight, and therefore is better happening earlier rather than later. I will now look at when the next courses are available, both up here and down south depending on the timing.

I feel, after the last couple of weeks where I was stagnating, that I'm now in the ascendancy again. That's life...

Location:Alderley Edge,United Kingdom