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gervase_fenI am now on leave until Sunday week, and for the first time in six months I am not preoccupied with any combination of -
* work and corrupt store managers
* finding a new place to work
* my new place of work and figuring out my role in a larger store
* finding somewhere to live
* commuting between old flat and new shop
* deep cleaning the old flat
* packing
* unpacking (almost - just a dozen out of over one hundred boxes left to tackle, and I need to contact Pickfords to send people to collect over one hundred flattened boxes).
There have been a couple of pieces of good news recently. I have a ten per cent pay rise starting in April. And after I obtain a bank statement posted to the new flat, and take a thirty minute bus ride into town, I will have satisfied the requests of the solicitors sorting out my grandmother's estate, which will solve some financial niggles (it should do - the first pay out is worth one and half times my annual salary.)
I have been relaxed enough to start reading books again - undemanding but competent thrillers such as Thomas Perry's Murder Book, a third read in thirty years of John Brunner's ecological dystopia The Sheep Look Up, and a quick whizz through the management lessons and anecdotes in Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult's Bazball - The Inside Story of a Test Cricket Revolution. One highlight is this Tolkien flavoured quote about what it was like step down as captain in the England set up -
And it was Root who had to make the biggest adjustment. Not every former England captain had done this successfully – that’s if they hadn’t retired first. In his first Test after standing down, in 2003, Nasser Hussain dropped South Africa’s Graeme Smith on 8 at Lord’s, then watched him make 259. The man who replaced him, Michael Vaughan, was unimpressed. Vaughan, meanwhile, never played another Test after stepping down five years later; neither did Andrew Strauss after he quit, in 2012. Alastair Cook played on for 18 months after relinquishing the captaincy in early 2017 – but, according to Root, ‘he was almost like Frodo after the ring went in the volcano, carrying a heavy burden still’.
I can certainly identify with that - "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". But this is no longer a constant, as it was when I would wake up after poor sleep and be concerned with all the worries listed above.
* work and corrupt store managers
* finding a new place to work
* my new place of work and figuring out my role in a larger store
* finding somewhere to live
* commuting between old flat and new shop
* deep cleaning the old flat
* packing
* unpacking (almost - just a dozen out of over one hundred boxes left to tackle, and I need to contact Pickfords to send people to collect over one hundred flattened boxes).
There have been a couple of pieces of good news recently. I have a ten per cent pay rise starting in April. And after I obtain a bank statement posted to the new flat, and take a thirty minute bus ride into town, I will have satisfied the requests of the solicitors sorting out my grandmother's estate, which will solve some financial niggles (it should do - the first pay out is worth one and half times my annual salary.)
I have been relaxed enough to start reading books again - undemanding but competent thrillers such as Thomas Perry's Murder Book, a third read in thirty years of John Brunner's ecological dystopia The Sheep Look Up, and a quick whizz through the management lessons and anecdotes in Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult's Bazball - The Inside Story of a Test Cricket Revolution. One highlight is this Tolkien flavoured quote about what it was like step down as captain in the England set up -
And it was Root who had to make the biggest adjustment. Not every former England captain had done this successfully – that’s if they hadn’t retired first. In his first Test after standing down, in 2003, Nasser Hussain dropped South Africa’s Graeme Smith on 8 at Lord’s, then watched him make 259. The man who replaced him, Michael Vaughan, was unimpressed. Vaughan, meanwhile, never played another Test after stepping down five years later; neither did Andrew Strauss after he quit, in 2012. Alastair Cook played on for 18 months after relinquishing the captaincy in early 2017 – but, according to Root, ‘he was almost like Frodo after the ring went in the volcano, carrying a heavy burden still’.
I can certainly identify with that - "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". But this is no longer a constant, as it was when I would wake up after poor sleep and be concerned with all the worries listed above.
