All in Good Time

"Come in," bellowed the large voice of the manager, as he pushed himself back into the leather chair that sat behind the mahogany, antique desk.

The office was a shrine to the eighties, it was a shoulder pad made of wood and soft furnishings. Everything on display was there to reinforce the power that the incumbent had over other people's lives. There was a bar along one side stocked with just whisky, a valuable work of art by Rothko hung on the adjacent edifice, and a collection of mounted squirrels finished off the surroundings, squirrels that had been killed by the hands of the powerful man that was sat behind his desk right now.

A blotting pad and an executive metal ball game were the only residents on the wide expanse of leather that was neatly inlaid within the mahogany.

The manager had developed a habit of turning to look out of the window, at the ancient tree outside, when waiting for anybody to walk into his office. This time was no different, and as Mike walked in gingerly, he was unsure whether to sit or stand in the absence of any universal indicator from his host.

He decided to sit down in the chair nearest the desk.

"Sit down," said the manager as he turned from the window, "oh, you have, I see. Well then?"

"You wanted to see me, Sir," replied Mike in a quieter voice than normal.

"Hmmm."

There was a pause while the manager reminded himself of the purpose for this minion infesting his office.

"Yes, yes, yes, I remember now," started the manager with a moment of clarity. "I want to talk with you regarding this bloody business of the project and what it means for you, and your sad little life."

"Thank you, Sir, it would be good to know, Sir," replied Mike now taking on a more Bob Cratchett quality.

"The bloody thing looks as though it'll be canned. I can't say that I agree with that but there you have it. I personally don't see anything wrong with the lack of any real benefit to the customers, we had a similar situation with that bloody thing in Africa, and after twenty years I've heard that they've finally found a use for that bridge.

"It's cost $6m and taken twice as long as originally estimated but what do they want, I believe that we're now making real progress in understanding the purpose of this project. So, anyway, I have to tell you now about the implications that this will hold for you."

Mike sat glued to the chair, waiting in anticipation at the words that were to come from upon a high.

"If it does get binned, and of course there is no guarantee yet, but if it does then you will be displaced and having said that, I would then look to progress your situation as quickly as possible so that you can gain some early assurance of your future. Although the leadership has now changed I hope that they will stick to the game rules that we had before christmas, and this is what I will check for you. But do not go planning anything yet, there is no guarantee that the decision will be to scrap it, that will come in a couple of weeks as the big manager is currently yachting in Spain and after that he is golfing in The Conga. When he can spare ten minutes of his life to thinking about the future of this project, and the seventy people that it affects, he will set to it, and once he sets to it he will get right to the nub of it."

"I hear, Sir, that the indicators are pointing towards the ultimate retreat from this initiative," suggested Mike.

"I wouldn't believe what you hear, young Holley," said the manager stretching back in his chair, and straightening his spine, "My job is to tell you what to hear, and anything else that you hear is not worth hearing. If I had my way people would leave their ears in my top drawer, and I would then return them when I want them to hear. So, remember, no hearing until it is something I want you to hear. You hear?"

"I think so, Sir. Thank you, Sir. I will wait to hear from you about the decision, Sir. When do you think I will hear?"

"You will probably hear some time the week after next, but if you don't hear then don't be despondent, you will hear after that point. One way or another you will bloody hear about this thing when you need to hear. Now, please leave, as I have an important thing to see about."

"Thank you, Sir," said Mike as he rose in his chair and made his way towards the door.

"When you are in my position, young Holley, you will have to see to things. The eyes that you think you have are just eyes to hold the place around the eye area until you get real eyes that will make you see stuff that you haven't seen before. The eye of a potato is the gateway to the sole of a shoe, and remember to see to that. I'll see you soon, young Holley, in a small way I like you."

"Thank you, Sir," replied Mike as he left.

The manager turned to look back out of the window, and decide how he was going to spend the rest of his day. He stood up, and reached for his jacket. He was going to adjourn to the club, where he would discuss the fall of the Yen and the rise of the Tibetan Baht, and plan his pretend fortunes with his one friend, Martin.


(All of this discussion has been based on anecdotal evidence of a situation which partly happened, and was partly invented by an over active imagination that compensates for a dull reality in which normal conversations happen every day. I thank you.)

Location:Chorley Hall Ln,Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

All Quiet on the Western Front

I would imagine that there must have been some quiet moments in the Hundred Years War. Although behind the scenes the General's were plotting and scheming and planning the next invasion or battle, on the surface it all looked calm. No-one can invade for one hundred years. Even the greatest invader of all time, Sven Ingamanns, nicknamed Darth Invader, who originated from Aalborg and participated in the Viking invasions from back in the day, only invaded for sixty two years before his axe finally went limp.

But anyway, these are not just lessons from your hero, but an analogy to the present situation that I'm in. I find that the last two weeks have not provided me with any real product to comment about without running the risk of becoming repetitive like one ant that follows another ant.

But I do want you to know that I am safe and well and surviving. I have now finished my website for The Change Institute (although I may still do stuff on it)(http://www.thechangeinstitute.co.uk/), I'm just about to send the next wave of candidates off to Literary Agents, we've had no more viewings on the house, and I'm still waiting for Judgement Day at work.

On the final item, things have moved on to a stage of boiling point, and the politics have really stepped up a gear. I have somehow been involved in the inner sanctum on the decision of either keeping Phase 2 alive or canning it. All of the stars are now pointing towards the ultimate canning of the whole thing, but obviously as this decision carries with it a sensitive political impact, the decision will therefore take twice as long.

However, if this conclusion is reached then it plays perfectly into my hands, and I can then get wheels in motion. The decision isn't expected until the beginning of next week at the earliest, and so sitting tight is the order of the day again.

I have a one-to-one today with my line manager in which I will once again broach the topic and talk through what-if scenarios, given that a conclusion is near. It will be interesting to see what his reaction still is.

It's getting tenser as it gets closer, and I will update here as soon as it comes.

I'm also going to start writing another book. I enjoy the process of writing a book, and I stopped writing the previous book about six months ago. I'll obviously continue with the touting of Plaster Scene but I'll now begin on the next work of art called The Lost Weekend.

I'm excited about the themes and the scope within this book, and I want to spend a significant amount of time planning it out so that I can make the message as meaningful as possible, whilst maintaining the humour.

Location:Chorley Hall Ln,Alderley Edge,United Kingdom

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