I’ve just joined Graze, a service that mails you a box of fruit, nuts and other goodies for the princely sum of £2.99 per box (P&P included). A friend of mine suggested it the other day and I was so curious I signed up there and then. My first box came yesterday, and this is my unboxing video (I fuzzed out a few bits because I forgot to hide my address. Duh!):

If you would like to try Graze, you can get your first box free and the second half price if you sign up with this code: CVDK8FP. There’s no limit to how often that code can be used, so knock yourselves out.

Overall, I was delighted with my Graze box. The fruit and nuts were very fresh and very high quality. More than once I’ve bought nuts from supermarkets only to find that they have already gone rancid and bitter, and it’s always a disappointment. My Graze box was so yummy that I forgot it was called “graze” and not, say, “hoover” or “bolt”. Ahem.

From a value point of view, yes, I probably could buy all the constituent bits cheaper, but the point is that I don’t. And if I do, I forget to eat them. Nothing like that’s going to happen with Graze because it’s just so easy: It totally ticks the ‘lazy’ box!

I’m also relying on it to replace my mid-afternoon trip to the corner shop to buy Coke and a Wispa. Whilst I’m still spending money on Graze, I am not going to spend money on empty calories that taste nice but don’t do me any good at all. As that’s a decision based on economy, health and want, I’m hoping I’ll stick to it this time.

My next box comes tomorrow. I can’t wait.

I have been on a lengthy crusade against the evil that is sugar, but must confess to mainly being on the losing side. The summer has been quite stressful and where once I lost my appetite when stressed now I seem to feel constant hunger. Part of that hunger is down to the amount of sugary food that I was eating – for some reason sugar makes me feel hungrier, not less hungry.

Anyway, various schemes to cut down on the number of times I was popping to the corner shop for a Coke and Wispa have failed. I’m not great at willpower and have even less of the stuff when stressed (although that’s because, as I’m sure I’ve said before, you only have a limited amount of willpower, although you can increase it with practice). Going cold turkey failed. Simply trying to cut down has failed. So time for some creative thinking.

Kev and I have joined a new gym which is larger and closer to our new flat than the old one was. It’s a 10 min walk through the park each morning, which is a most pleasant way to bookend one’s work-out. This new gym has machines that weren’t available to us in the old gym, including a crunchie machine (for your abdominals) and a lower back resistance machine.

My new scheme combines and reinforces gym and a reduction in sugar intake and it’s really very simple.

I can only buy treats at the shop when I have burnt off their calorific equivalent at the gym.

It’s very simple and so far it seems to be working. It encourages me to work harder at the gym and gives me some idea of how many calories you actually work off. It turns out that I have been burning relatively few calories at the gym, which would explain why I’m fitter but still getting fatter. In our morning workouts, which are only half an hour long, I spend half my time doing resistance work and the rest on the recumbent bike, treadmill or cross-trainer. In that latter 15 mins, I tend to burn only about 75 kcal.

If you’ve ever tried to find a sugary treat that comes in at under 75 calories you’ll know that it’s basically impossible. A can of Coke is 139 kcal and a Wispa is 210 kcal. People have advised me to go for dark chocolate because it’s less sugary. That might be so, but a large bar of Green & Black’s 70% Cocoa is over 500 kcal.

This means that it takes me two workouts during the week to earn enough kcal to have a Coke, and three to earn a Wispa. Erk! I don’t think I’d ever really realised how much effort I need to expend in order to work off one of my favourite treats but now I know it really has changed the way that I think about them. I always knew that these were empty calories – there’s no nutritional value in them at all. They’re stupid calories. But, well, a kcal is bigger than I thought it was!

The nice thing about this is that I can still have my treats, but only when I’ve earnt them. So I don’t need to go cold turkey and I don’t really need willpower. I just need to make sure that I get up early enough to go to the gym and that I work hard whilst I’m there.

I really do hope that this will result in the loss of a few *cough* pounds because I’m heavier now than I’ve ever been. Trousers that were really loose on me once now fit snugly. I really can’t let that go on otherwise I’ll be a blimp before you know it.

So wish me luck and here’s hoping this tactic really does work.

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while, but I’ve been a bit busy lately and have barely had time to pause for breath.

Several months ago I started working on strengthening my shoulders at the gym – lots of machine work to try and improve the strength of my whole upper back. I’d noticed that some nights, I’d wake up with pins and needles in my hand and find my shoulders had sorts of ‘collapsed’ in on themselves, and I suspected that maybe that wasn’t helping things. I’ve always had weak shoulders, so figured it couldn’t hurt to do some work on them.

When we moved into our new flat I finally had space to set up a proper office, so I now have my old desk and chair, brought up from Dorset and no longer have to work from the sofa. That, in itself, is a joy. It’s so good to have a door to close at the end of the evening! I’m again pretty sure that my lack of a proper desk and chair have contributed significantly to my RSI. Sitting on the sofa didn’t so much encourage bad posture as force it upon me.

On the advice of my friend Sydney, I bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet and pen, which I now use instead of a mouse/trackpad. Although at the lower end of the graphics tablet market (Sydney has the Cintiq, which is gorgeous but way too expensive for me!), it does me very well. It took me a while to get used to using it instead of the trackpad, but now that I am used to it, I’d never go back. It’s much, much easier for editing long documents because you have much better control of the cursor, plus it encourages larger movements than the tiny, fine motor control movements required on a trackpad. It is, in short, fabulous. And sometimes I even use it for drawing!

Kevin bought me a laptop stand, so now I have my office exactly as I want it: Laptop on stand, Wacom tablet to the left (I’m left-handed), and my lovely Apple bluetooth keyboard in front of the laptop. It works incredibly well as a set up and I’d highly recommend anyone who’s working with a laptop as their main machine to experiment with it as a set-up. I also no longer feel the need to get myself a new screen, as having the laptop screen at a decent height also makes it feel somehow like the screen’s not so small! Not quite sure why…

I’ve been following the exercises in Robin McKenzie’s 7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life, which has really helped me to sort out my own back pain – particularly when I put my back out three weeks ago and could barely move. I usually would have gone to a chiro but I rather lost faith in my chiro in London and didn’t feel I had time to find a new one. As it turns out, McKenzie’s exercises are incredibly helpful and have really given my back a new lease of life.

About a month ago, I went to see a consultant physiotherapist at the University College London Hospital. She did a variety of tests – including a nerve induction test which confirmed that I had mild carpal tunnel syndrome. I explained what I’d been doing and she was very pleased with the changes that I’ve made. Indeed, she said that I’ve done pretty much everything she would have advised me to do.

She also told me to expect all my RSI symptoms to vanish within three months. As they had already subsided considerably, I was ready to believe her. In actual fact, I’ve barely had any problems at all over the last month and have trouble the last time remembering when I had a serious attack overnight.

I still have a way to go in terms of improving my shoulder and back strength, and retraining my posture, but I feel pretty confident now that my RSI is under control.

Dear me, it’s been ages since I last wrote a blog post here. How things have changed since I first started Chocolate and Vodka seven years ago!

Mainly, the problem has been one of time and energy. The last few years seem to have been an almost constant sequence of events and projects that have taken all my attention and left me little time to blog, and even less inclination. I think being on Twitter has rather decreased the desire to write here too – if I have something on my mind I can tell everyone via Twitter and get pretty much instant feedback. In the years BT (Before Twitter), if I got myself some sort of brainworm, it would just wriggle round in my head until I finally found time to get it out into a blog post. Now that happens a lot less often. Mostly, I think to myself “I must blog that some time” and then promptly forget it.

Back then I also had a life that I really wanted to escape from. When I started this blog, I was living on my own in Reading, knew no one there, rarely socialised, and was stressed beyond belief trying to get my business to work. When it failed, I used my blog and my online network of friend to keep me sane. The blog then wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Without it I would have felt intolerably isolated and unhappy.

Then I started consulting, moved to London, started the Open Rights Group, met my husband, got married, moved house twice, and generally got myself so busy that half the time I barely knew which way to turn. My underemployed days were over. And when business wasn’t doing great, I busied myself trying to plump up my client list, and blogging then felt like the ultimate indulgence.

I wonder too if I shouldn’t have kept all my writing here, on Chocolate and Vodka. My other blogs, notably Kits and Mortar, Lost Yod, and Finding Ada could, I suppose, all have lived as categories here, but for some reason that didn’t quite feel right. I wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t amalgamate them, bring them all in under Chocolate and Vodka’s roof and at least then there’d be a bit more blogging going on.

I’m not sure why I create a new site every time I have a new idea. I think part of it is because I worry that those of you who come here to find out about me, or my writing, or whatever it is that draws you here, would be put off by an influx of posts about cats or self-build, or women in tech, or jewellery-making. But even having created, say, Kits and Mortar to be home to my thoughts on moggies and house building, even there I worry that the balance is wrong, and that those who go there for building ideas would be pissed off if I write too much about cats.

To be fair, I did think that Kits and Mortar might become more commercial than it is. Yes, ok, it’s got advertising on it, but I don’t have the time or the wherewithal to really make it work as a pro-blog. I think in the year and a bit it’s been live I’ve earnt probably about 20 quid from the ads, so it’s hardly worth it. And although lots of people told me when I launched it that it was a great niche idea and that I could make a killing, the only thing it killed was time.

Part of the fear of being as much of an intellectual magpie – ooh! shiny! – as I am is that people will view me as a generalist and will think less of me because of it. This is a theme that both Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth have discussed in recent days, and I feel that both of them have hit the nail on the head.

But the truth is that I have always had what might these days be diagnosed as ADD. I don’t think that it’s a disorder – I think it’s just curiosity. I am curious about everything, from what makes cats tick to how to have large windows without wasting huge amounts of energy through them to the jewellery styles favoured by the Elizabethans.

So I find myself seriously considering migrating all the content from all my other blogs to here, and shutting them down. I’m paying quite a bit, yearly, on hosting fees that perhaps I don’t need to. Certainly I’ve given up on the idea that I’m ever going to have time to focus fully on Kits and Mortar or Lost Yod, or even the ill-fated Fruitful Seminars. Finding Ada I’ll probably keep as a separate entity as it may one day grow up to be a bigger organisation than it currently is, but the rest of it really is just me exploring whatever takes my fancy. And what is Chocolate and Vodka for if not for me to take my fancy wherever it wants to go?

I’ve just 40 minutes of battery life left on my MacBook, and nowhere to plug it in. I might well be sitting in United’s “Economy Plus”, but they haven’t seen fit to install plugs for anyone wanting to, y’know, do work on an 11 hour flight.

Things have been utterly insane of late. It’s hard to know where to begin. Ada Lovelace Day was a smash hit, but I’ve barely had time to even think about how amazing it was, because Kevin and I have been house hunting. Kev took two weeks off work to find us somewhere new to live, and he did a damn fine job. We now have a spare room, more space and more of a sense that we’re going to enjoy the flat, rather than feel like we’re invading our landlady’s personal space. We boxed everything up, with much needed help from friends, and moved over the Easter weekend. We haven’t gone far, just to the Arsenal side of the train tracks, but our new neighbourhood is much nicer. We might be further away from the supermarkets and the gym, which is a bit of a pain, but we’re near two parks and there are a lot more nice restaurants and pubs nearby.

The move has also taken us away from the scene of Ahmet Paytak’s murder. He worked at our corner shop, and I must have seen him nearly every day for the few months that he’d been working there. Then one night, as he and his son were closing up, a couple of chaps on a motorbike decided to shoot him and his son, for reasons that remain unclear. Ahmet died, his son Husseyin was shot in the thigh. I felt such sadness for Ahmet’s family. He was a lovely chap, quite quiet and shy but always friendly. Then one day he went to work and never came home.

More positively, I have been insanely busy with work. Last year was an almost total wash-out where work was concerned. I was busy up until the wedding, but summer and autumn were dreadful. Partly it was because I tried to expand my business, instead of focusing down on what I’m good at; partly because I was utterly rubbish at marketing myself (I’m not a natural when it comes to sales and marketing); and partly because I think businesses were waiting for the economic shoe to drop. Now everyone knows how bad the situation is and the truth is that you can’t just put business off forever. Some stuff just has to be done, and thankfully that includes the sort of stuff I do.

This year is shaping up to be much better. Not only am I having a whale of a time with Book Oven, who have to get the award for Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With A Client, but I’m now working on a research project for Carnegie UK Trust on the role of social (and ‘new’) media in civil society. I’m going to be blogging more about that on Strange Attractor. That sees me busy through til mid-July, then off to Prague before collapsing in a heap.

I’ve been writing a lot more. Not the fiction recently, but over the last few months I’ve done long piece for .Net magazine, and more for The Guardian’s tech section. I’m doing better at researching and writing quickly: it’s taking about 2 days for me to research and write 800 words now, and I’m learning not to over-report which helps a lot. But I want to get much, much better at writing effectively this year, so expect more from me.

Now I’m on a plane to San Francisco, primarily to attend O’Reilly’s Social Web Foo Camp, but also to do a bit of research for the Carnegie project. When I get back, I’m looking forward to focusing on my main two projects and to spending more time relaxing with my husband. We’ve barely had a chance to catch our breath the last few months, but hopefully, now the move is over, we can chill out a little. Hopefully!!

In early November last year, I had steroid injections in both wrists to try and treat my carpal tunnel syndrome. After some initial side effects, the injections seemed to have done the trick. Instances of pins and needles in my hands over night decreased to nothing and I pretty much forgot that I’d had RSI. Until mid-January, when it all came back with a vengeance.

I had nine nights during January where I was getting pins and needles almost every night, and not just once, but two or three times, and it’s been like that, off and on, ever since. Now, don’t underestimate these pins and needles – it’s like a non-painful type of pain. It wakes you right up, and it keeps you awake until they’re gone. I discovered that if I stretch my neck in a certain way (away from the affected hand) the pins and needles would vanish almost immediately, almost all the time. Good trick – it helps me not wake up too much when an attack comes on.

So yesterday I went back to the physio to see what he had to say about it. Apparently, the steroids wear off in about five or so weeks, so I mine worked for about nine, which isn’t bad but not all that great either. The physio is reluctant to give me more steroids, as you can only have three injections a year and if they only work for nine or so weeks, it won’t help long term. Instead he’s referring me to the surgeon for an assessment for, well, surgery.

I’ve already had a number of tests, which have taken the form of flexing my wrists in certain ways, and pushing hard on certain points in my neck and shoulders, and I come up negative for all of them. My physio did them all again yesterday, and despite the fact that I had concluded that it’s all in my neck, he said that the tests he did proved it wasn’t.

So the first thing the surgeon will do is a “conduction” test:

In a nerve conduction study, electrodes are placed on the hand and wrist. Small electric shocks are applied and the speed with which nerves transmit impulses is measured. In electromyography, a fine needle is inserted into a muscle; electrical activity viewed on a screen can determine the severity of damage to the median nerve.

Then they’ll decide whether surgery is a good idea or not.

Now, I used to be a big gung-ho about surgery, until I actually had some. Having a naughty mole removed (twice! (with pics)) made me think a bit harder about what surgery actually means, and now I’d really rather avoid it if at all possible.

I’m not actually suffering any pain or discomfort during the day. Occasionally I get a strange sensation in my hands, but it’s not pain, it’s more a physical feeling of something wrong. It’s hard to describe accurately, but you’d know it if you felt it.

I am, however, having a lot of back pain, and I have a long, long history of some quite serious back problems. I’ve had chiropractic treatment for years, and without it I would be in a right mess now, so my first instinct is to go back to that. I had been seeing someone in Islington, but like all these things, quality varies. I lost faith in her after she suggested that the pins and needles in my fingers could be diabetes, but failed to spot that it was more likely (given my general health) to be carpal tunnel.

So that means I need to find another. I’ve had a chiro and a physio recommended to me, but they are both out of London and it would be a bit of a trek for regular consultations. A London clinic recommended by someone I don’t know looks rather expensive, and I’m not exactly what you could call rolling in it right now. I’ve had acupuncture before and that worked well for certain types of problem. I’ve been told that for some people with RSI it can work, but to be honest, I’m willing to try it regardless, because having tiny needles stuck in you is better than having your wrists slit open.

My chiro down in Dorset, who’s very good but too far away for regular visits, has told me that carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t something that she can fix. That may be the case, but I’d like to rule chiro out through experimentation. My spine needs attention anyway so I’ll benefit from getting it all sorted out and put back in the right place. And if I still suffer the pins and needles, I’ll move on to acupuncture. Surgery has to be a last resort.

But it’s important to say that this is not like the mole, where there was a danger it would turn cancerous and where it was important to move swiftly and excise every last bad cell. If I had another mole go bad, I would not hesitate to get it removed. There are some things that alternative therapies such as chiropractic can do, and there are things that they can’t. Right now, I don’t know which category my RSI falls into, so I’m just going to have to find out.

Last year, psychologists discovered that humans aren’t really all that great at “willpower”:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others.

Another key discovery last year was made by Kevin, who found that if you overwhelm your body clock with exhaustion at the end of a trip, you get over jetlag much quicker.

This year, I’m planning on combining the two discoveries to attempt to rework certain aspects of my life. Rather than having one little New Year’s Resolution that attempts to change one behaviour, I’m going to totally overwhelm my brain’s poor willpower circuits by doing lots at once. I know that’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, but what the hell, it’s worth a shot.

My basic plan for 2009 is “Do a little, every day”, and I’ll be applying that to pretty much everything. I’ve already started with a new email regime, which involves putting all of 2008’s outstanding emails into a folder (which I will sort through during January), and vowing to keep my inbox empty. I’ll be more batchy with my email checking – four or five times a day, and I’ll process them rather than just read them. That’s going to be quite a big new habit to get into.

I’m not the only one trying to change my email ways – Bill Thompson and I put together a pledge on Pledgebank:

Pledge “tidyinbox”

“I will ensure that my inbox is empty before I go to bed each day in 2009 but only if 25 other online peeps will do the same.”

— Bill Thompson, of andfinally.com

Deadline to sign up by: 30th January 2009
9 people have signed up, 16 more needed

More details
Suw and Bill believe that inbox cleanliness is as close to godliness as atheistic net users get. We’d like our friends to join us in our quest for virtue and salvation.

If you want a new start to your email year, come and join us!

I think my basic problem is that I tend to hoard things up and then feel that I need a huge chunk of time to get anything done. Of course, I never have a huge chunk of time, so nothing really gets done until it’s urgent. It’s not just email, it’s everything. You name it, I can procrastinate it!

So for 2009, my aim is to just do a little bit of big tasks on a regular basis. I shall be applying this to:

• email
• blogging
• paperwork & administrivia
• jewellery making (this is especially important – I can’t make lots of jewellery in one go without knackering my wrists)
• writing
• tidying up
• cleaning
• going to the gym
• putting clothes away
• quitting sugary drinks and snacks
• preparing for our house move in Spring, e.g. recycling clothes, shredding documents

…and pretty much anything else I can think of. I’m hoping the fact that I’m attempting to change an underlying attitude rather than lots of different behaviours will help me succeed, but feel free to keep me honest and ask me via Twitter whether I’m keeping up with it or not.

My physio warned me that the steroid injections would come with side effects, and he wasn’t wrong. To start with, a strange sense of tension in my wrists (that’ll be the extra fluid within the carpal tunnel, then) and then very faint pins and needles in my hands (that’ll be the extra fluid aggravating the nerve, then). My advisory information sheet suggested that I “rest the area for at least 24 hours” and that I “not undertake prolonged, vigorous activities for 48 hours”.

That’s all well and good, but how do you define “rest” for your wrists? Luckily for me, there was the small matter of the American election to provide me with a little distraction, and so that evening I went off to west London to a friend’s house for an Election party. I Twittered a little bit, but mainly was just clicking between various different news outlets’ election maps to see how things were going. And I gave up even that when my wrists started to get a bit antsy.

Wednesday, the aching started for real. Although not what you could consider pain, I really didn’t want to make things any worse than they already are so decided to err on the side of caution. I’d been up until 3.30am, and had only had four hour’s sleep, so a nap helped both restore a little functionality to my brain and give me an opportunity to truly rest my wrists.

Now, four days later, my wrists are very much improved and, although there is still a little discomfort, I don’t feel that I need to rest them as much as I have been doing. This means, hopefully, that I can now resume pre-injection levels of typing and writing, although I’m not going to go back to pre-CTS levels of typing until I am sure that everything is ok. Which means that Kits and Mortar is still on ice for the moment.

The other side effect of all this is that it means I haven’t touched The Revenge of the Books of Hay since Monday. In a way that’s disappointing, because it’s rather interrupted the momentum that I had built up, but in another way it’s given me a chance to think about a small problem that was turning into a bit of a roadbloke. Hopefully I can have a good run at it tonight and tomorrow and, perhaps, the climax might hove into view, and then it’ll be all downhill next week.

Of course, once the handwritten version is done, I need to type it all up, and I already know that the second draft is going to be substantially different to the first. But then, you know what they say: Writing is rewriting. It’ll be nice to be at that stage, though.

I had my injections this afternoon. Let’s hope this is the end of things!

Since I met Kev, Hallowe’en has become much more important than it ever used to be. Out in the wild depths of Dorset we didn’t make Jack o’ Lanterns. In fact, I’d never made one until 2005, when we killed Kenny. This year I did the pumpkin carving on my own, which rather took some of the fun out of it, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. Photos are a little fuzzy – Kev’s got the good camera with him – but so it goes.

The tools

The Pattern
Nicked, shamelessly, from the cover of Neil’s Graveyard Book.

Transferring the pattern

Starting the carve

The finished thing… with the lights on

And with the lights off

And, if you’re still unsure wtf it is:

Things are, at last, improving!

First night with splints, and first Alexander Technique session. (I recorded this last night, but Viddler didn’t encode it in time for me to post it here.)

The bad news is that I have carpal tunnel syndrome. The good news is that we’ve caught it early and the prognosis for a full recovery is good!

I really do get depressed at the state of the State in the UK these days. Labour have turned us into a country Orwell would be shocked by, and this post from Cory Doctorow made me even more depressed about the direction the UK is going:

Jacqui Smith, the British Home Secretary, had unilaterally (and on 24 hours’ notice) changed the rules for Highly Skilled Migrants to require a university degree, sending hundreds of long-term, productive residents of the UK away (my immigration lawyers had a client who employed over 100 Britons, had fathered two British children, and was nonetheless forced to leave the country, leaving the 100 jobless). Smith took this decision over howls of protests from the House of Lords and Parliament, who repeatedly sued her to change the rule back, winning victory after victory, but Smith kept on appealing (at tax-payer expense) until the High Court finally ordered her to relent (too late for me, alas).

Now, it seems, I will become one of the first people in Britain to be forced to carry a mandatory biometric RFID card in a pilot programme being deployed first to foreign students and we spousal visa holders (government is looking to curtail spousal visas altogether, capping all visas at 20,000 per year, including spousal visas, denying Britons the right to bring their spouses into the country once the quota has been filled).

This sort of stuff is not just academic – it could directly affect Kevin and I. We need to transition Kevin onto a spousal visa as soon as we can. (Indeed, I am currently searching for a good immigration lawyer (recommendations welcome!).) If the Government limit spousal visas, they are going to end up punishing people simply for falling in love.

Kevin’s been away a little over a week and I miss him horribly, but at least I know when he’s coming back. I cannot imagine how hard it would be if we had to be parted indefinitely whilst we waited for the government to deign to give him a visa. Capping spousal visas is, in my opinion, nothing short of evil. It’s bad enough that the government are forcing out of the country the very people we need here to have a vibrant economy – the highly skilled people who contribute all of their talent and intelligence to our country. But arbitrarily restricting spousal visa is the sort of cold, cruel act I’ve come to expect from our government. They’ve forgotten that they exist to serve the people of this country, not to make their lives hell because they happened to fall in love with someone who wasn’t born here.

And let’s not kid ourselves. The people who are punished by immigration laws are the people who respect the law and try to do things properly. The people who ignore the law, either living here illegally or faking their documentation, won’t be affected by this sort of change.

Labour has to be defeated at the next election, because they are turning our country into a suspicious, heartless, cold place. And we have to support organisations like No2ID who are working tirelessly to try and stop this country turning into an Orwellian nightmare.

I was at Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Cologne last week and one of the people I met there mentioned that they had noticed I hadn’t been blogging so much lately. They’re right, I haven’t been writing even a fraction as much as I used to, either here on Chocolate and Vodka, or over on Strange Attractor. (I have been trying to write on Kits and Mortar, but even that has suffered in recent weeks.)

One friend wondered if it was marriage that caused the decrease in blogging, with Kevin taking up my every waking minute, but that’s not the case. Actually, Kevin spends a fair amount of time on the computer during which I could easily blog, but I haven’t.

It is true that I am a lot more social now that I’m with him than I was when I was on my own – I can be quite a homebody, and too much socialising makes me tense and twitchy. I need time alone to recharge my batteries. (Luckily, time spent with Kevin is equivalent to time spent alone when it comes to recuperating – I can be totally myself with Kevin, so can be totally relaxed. I can’t really say that was the case with any of my exen.)

It’s possible that all this socialising has rather slaked my thirst for social interactions of any kind, and that the drive to connect with people via my blog(s) has been decreased because I spend so much more time now talking to people face-to-face than I used to. I certainly think that my enthusiastic (I hate to say obsessive) use of Twitter has also fulfilled that need and taken the emphasis off blogging. There’s a theory that we each have a certain number of words that we need to get through each day, and I think I’ve been getting through my allotment by about 1pm, on average.

But there are other forces at play. Kevin has a theory that your life is split into three main areas – work, social and relationships – and that when things are going well in two areas, the third suffers. Obviously ‘relationship’ is pretty well nailed now – I never knew I could be this happy in a relationship. Kevin was certainly worth waiting for, and I no longer resent all the bad experiences in my past, nor all those awfully lonely nights (and days). Good things come to those who wait, and I could not have asked for better.

Social is covered, as I’ve said. I have lots of lovely friends, although some of them I see less often than I would like. And I have met lots of very lovely people through Kevin, who I like to think are my friends now too, not just “my husband’s friends”.

So that leaves work. And here’s the truth of it: my work life has sucked, all summer. I had lots of work in the run up to our wedding, and then lots of leads that came in whilst I was away on honeymoon, but almost all of those came to nothing, or very little. I thought that it would be a good idea to launch a seminar series, so I put a lot of effort into Fruitful, but as I’m being honest I might as well tell you that it didn’t really do as well as I’d hoped. Mainly because, I think, my marketing sucked.

I’m not good at self-promotion, and have been lucky enough over the last four years that, mostly, work has landed in my lap. People have read Strange Attractor or seen me talk at conferences and have thought to themselves “Yeah, we could use her advice”. I’ve been pretty bad at talking to old clients and seeing how they are getting on, asking them for leads and referrals, and generally trying to do all the stuff that a savvy freelancer should do. I vow to get better at that over the coming months.

Because I feel uncomfortable doing self-promotion, I have actively avoided it, in roughly the same way that your average cat avoids baths. I saw Fruitful as a way to route around the aspects of my business that were frustrating me. I thought it would just take off, and I’d get lots of people at my seminars and life would be good. I got one person at each, and although they both seemed extremely happy to be the sole focus of my attention for a day, I can’t say that that was a great financial success.

It’s funny, but when my personal life is going badly, I am quite happy to blog in sometimes quite gory detail, as you will have seen if you were reading this blog pre-Kevin. But when things go wrong with business, that’s when I clam up. I become unwilling to talk about anything, because I might end up revealing too much, and confessing that my business isn’t doing great feels like exposing my biggest and most sacred secrets to the world. It makes me feel very, very vulnerable. Just writing this, right now, makes me feel like I’ve just striped naked and paraded myself down the high street. It’s an awful feeling, but I’ve learnt from Stephanie Booth that it’s not a bad thing to talk frankly and honestly about your business, even when it’s not doing well.

Stephanie recently had to take the unhappy step of cancelling a conference – Going Solo Leeds – she was putting on. I have enormous respect for her making that decision, because it would have been easy to try to carry on as if all was well and then try to gloss over it later. But she had the strength to say “This conference is going to be under-attended, and it’s not going to be the event that I advertised, or the event that I want people to experience. So I’m cancelling it and taking the financial hit.”

I am just full of admiration for her openness and honesty, and her fortitude throughout the last couple of months. I was one of the speakers at Going Solo Lausanne, which was a fabulous conference, and I was due to speak in Leeds too. We ended up having an unconference instead, SoloCamp, from which I learnt a lot. But I’ve mostly learnt this year’s most important lessons from talking to Steph about the challenges she’s faced, many of which are the same ones that face me.

This doesn’t mean that I have magically solved my problems, but I feel like I have a bit more direction now than I did even a month ago. I have learnt that using social media to market to people who don’t already get social media is inevitably going to be difficult. I’ve learnt that I need to put myself in front of the right people, and in order to that I need to figure out who the right people are. I’ve learnt that in order to do that I need to pull in favours from friends and from acquaintances – some of whom I have done favours for in the past, some of whom I now owe.

I’m still struggling with questions that begin with ‘how’, though. Some promotional actions – such as “Email details of my seminars to Fortune 500 companies’ HR departments”, which seems like a good way to promote Fruitful – still confuse me. Where do I find the right people and their email addresses without either a) spending a fortune or b) spending hours fruitlessly in Google? How do I communicate with strangers without it being spam? This sort of stuff just doesn’t come naturally to me, and I know I’m going to find it difficult, but I also know that it’s something I must address.

But that’s not the only corner turned recently. An opportunity – about which I can say nothing except “Squeeeee!” – has arisen. The exact shape and form of it is not entirely clear, but it does give me hope that I will have a constructive autumn, winter and spring at the very least. Knowing that there’s something exciting on the horizon is also probably the one thing that has let me write this blog post at all – it gives me a positive note to end on, a moment of hope and excitement that wipes away all previous uncertainty.

And just as soon as I can go public with it, I promise that I’ll tell you everything.

UPDATE: The opportunity that made me go Squeeee! sadly went away. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

Not that this will actually have any impact on how much blogging gets done here, given that I’ve been sadly far too quiet here in recent months, but Kev and I are off for a week to hike along Offa’s Dyke, from Chepstow to Knighton. Well, Kev will hike, I will probably waddle and moan my way along, particularly given the fact that it’s supposed to piss down for the first half of the week. We’re spending half our time in B&Bs, the rest of our time camping.

I’m going to spend the time thinking a lot. And dreaming of our next holiday, which will take place in spa, somewhere hot.

Kevin and I are being driven to distraction. The warm sunny weather has been lovely, right up until the point where we want to go to bed. Ours is a top floor flat, you see, and it can get quite warm in here, so on hot summery nights we like to have the windows open for a bit of fresh air. Unfortunately, several of our neighbours like having loud parties, or sitting in their garden having shouty discussions, even on school nights. We have been kept awake or woken up five times in the last two weeks by three different sets of neighbours. Last night, the party started at 2.30am, and is still going on now, as I write at 8.30am.

For my own records, the chronology goes like this:

17 June – Neighbour in middle flat, No. 74 goes berserk, breaks into his own flat, smashes the place up, and we call the police. Police arrive quickly, arrest him, come and have a chat to us and our downstairs neighbours. Turns out he was threatening our neighbour that afternoon with “I could kill you, I could. But I won’t. But I could kill you.” Sort of like Vicki Pollard goes to the dark side. Same night, neighbours begin to move in to no. 78, which had been empty for a month. We thought the two disturbances were related, they weren’t.

18 June – For a few days, new neighbours at 78 are moving their stuff in, but only after 10pm. They’re not quiet about it.

21 June – Neighbours at 78 have a spirited and lively discussion in their garden, at the tops of their voices. We can hear them with the window open. We can hear them with the window shut.

? June – Big party in the garden of no 74 which went on until the small hours, although I can’t remember precisely which day. However, it prompted…

4 July – I order several different types of earplugs.

5 – 9 July – Kev and I are away in Prague. Sleep better in the hotel than we have been at home.

12 July – Neighbours at No. 78 have massive garden party which starts mid-afternoon and goes on until 3 or 4 in the morning. Kevin and I blow up our inflatable mattress and sleep in the front room, because there’s no way we’ll be able to sleep in the bedroom. Use our new Alpine SleepSoft earplugs. They cut out the last fragments of noise that trickles through to the front room. As we’re preparing to go to go to sleep, one of the party-goers passes out, flat on his back on the pavement. His friend attempts to rouse him by kicking him.

15 July – No. 78 have another fun discussion in their garden, starting at 10pm and going til some time after 2am. Alpine SleepSoft earplugs fail. They can’t cut out enough noise for me to sleep. I try the pink noise trick – put a track of pink noise on repeat on my iPod, put in one sound isolating earphone in my upper ear, and try to sleep. Sorta works. Can’t put earphones in both ears as too uncomfortable.

17 July – No. 78 have yet another fun discussion in their garden, starting late and going on for a few hours. Try playing pink noise really loudly on our iPod speakers. Doesn’t really work, not least because system turns off before arseholes next door have finished yapping. Co-incidentally, get letter from social housing landlord about “anti-social behaviour by one of your neighbours.” Hoping they mean No. 78, but it’s hard to tell – there’s so much of it about.

18 July – Spend hours on the phone to social housing landlord and discover that they meant the nutjob who broke into his own flat back in June, not the wankers at No. 78. Rang the council and got the number for the Noise Patrol, who will come and assess the noise.

22 July – No 74 have a party in their garden this time. Is in full swing by the time I get home from hanging out with friends, and goes on at least until 2am. Discover that PillowSoft earplugs, which are basically balls of silicon putty that you plaster over the entrance to your ear canal, work well at cutting out noise, but take a bit of getting used to.

24 July – A bunch of arseholes living on Hornsey Road, a few doors down from us, come home at 2.30am and start raving. I can see them from my window, doing that stupid fist air punch thing. Angrily get up and call Noise Patrol. Even more angrily discover that our neighbours have had the discourtesy to have their party outside of the hours that the Noise Patrol work on a weekday. They do 8pm until 2am Sunday to Thursday, and 10pm until 4am on Friday and Saturday. What? Do noise disturbances never occur outside these hours?

Kevin and I are exhausted, we really are. He’s had two really early starts this week – 4am on Monday, to go and do a BBC interview, and 6.45am on Wednesday so he could get to an event. Today, both of us are so tired that we’ve pretty much given up on the day before it has even begun. Kev’s phoned in sick for the first time since I’ve known him, and his boss has kindly said he understands how exhausted Kev is and not to worry. Knowing Kev, he’ll work from home, in between the naps that we’re both going to need just to function.

I have never had so much of a problem with noise. Even when I was in Reading and suffering from the noise pollution and abuse heaped upon me from the guy who lived upstairs, it wasn’t this bad. This is not just one bad apple, this is a whole host of selfish, narcissistic, thoughtless arses who give absolutely no thought to their neighbours and have no regard for the disruption they are causing those around them.

Kev and I struggle with the way that people in London seem to live in their own selfish little bubble, never moving over when they block your way on the pavement, never giving you room to get off the train during rush hour, never respecting or considering those around them. But at least when we came home, we had some relief from the constant press of people.

Not anymore. Now, our privacy is being invaded on a regular basis, our peace and quiet disrupted, our sleep destroyed. And for what? How hard would it be for them to just keep their voices down? Keep the music at a level where it can’t be heard outside? What would the loss to them be? You can still enjoy yourself in your garden without shouting. We all live too close together not to try to consider other people. Where are these people’s basic common decency?

Personally, and pragmatically, I hope the rest of the summer is wet and rainy – the rain helps keep the noise down and I’d rather have some sleep than a sunny summer.

Updates will be appended here, for my own records more than anything.

28 July: BBQ and party in the garden, starting late (between 9pm and 10pm). Very noisy again, so we set up camp in the front room. We also called the Noise Patrol at about 11.30pm, who called us back, and then came round to see what was up. They arrived about 12.15am, but were pretty unhelpful. They explained that there’s little they can really do unless the neighbours start using amplified music. They did say that they would go round there and have a word, but I didn’t see any evidence that that word was successful. We will keep calling them out, as the more we call them out the more seriously they will take it (their advice), and I will also call the daytime noise department and open a complaint with them, again, on the night team’s advice. (Apparently it helps to have two complaints open with the two different teams. Hm. Joined up government, anyone?)

Things eventually quietened down a bit sometime before 3am, and we went from the blow-up mattress on the front room, which was deeply uncomfortable as we hadn’t put down the duvets on top of it to sleep on, back to our own bed. I could then hear the faint strains of music, which was just one the edge of my hearing, so consequently just enough to bug me.

I’m really not sure how much of this I can actually take.

7 Aug, 8 Aug: Yay! Let’s have a beer in the garden and talk really loudly so that the neighbours wake up! Not as loudly as before, I will admit, so shutting the window cut out the noise, but they started both nights at 1am. *grumps*

I know I’ve hardly blogged here in ages, apart from the odd post that’s been too noisy in my head to keep cooped up, but I thought that perhaps an update was in order. Most dramatic news at the moment is that I have left the Open Rights Group. After three years of fighting the good fight, it became very clear to me that it was time to move on. Although I’m not sure who has flown whose nest, I’m very proud of what we have achieved, and I encourage you all to go and give your support on a monthly basis by standing order. The Government is soon going to start eating kittens if you don’t, so spend five minutes and give ORG a tenner a month. Trust me, it’s cheaper than getting a new identity when the Home Office loses yours.

As you may have spotted yesterday, I got a hobby. Back in the day, I used play bass guitar for fun – not so much for profit – but that’s still up in my parent’s loft in Dorset. Now, I’m making faux Renaissance jewellery out of dried beetle carapaces and petrified angels’ tears. Oh, alright, out of glass pearls and Swarovski crystal. I find it very calming and soothing, and if the wedding has taught me one thing, it’s that I needed a hobby, and one that didn’t involve computers.

And, of course, Kits and Mortar is taking up a lot of time, and is masses of fun. I had a brilliant time at Grand Designs Live the other week, and I have a lot of things that I want to blog there about that, even now, a week or so later.

But getting married was sort of like an über-New Year, the very essence of new beginning, and one of the things I realised whilst we were away in Barbados was that my life was untenable in its current form. I counted up all the projects where either people expected something of me, or I expected something of myself. I had 15 of them, only one of which was “freelance”. So I’ve been doing a lot of pruning – part of which involves leaving ORG – and trying to formally close down fallow projects so that they didn’t lurk in my head and occasionally mutter about having been left behind and forgotten.

I’ve also promised myself that I’m going to use the word ‘No’ a lot more, and I hope no one will be offended by it. I’m going to say no to a lot more events, opportunities, and requests for help. My life’s been spread thinner and thinner and thinner, but now I really want to focus on a few things, and do them really well. My marriage is one of those things – getting married to Kevin was the best thing that I’ve ever done. He makes me so amazingly happy, and I want to put aside time and energy to enjoy that, to nurture it, and to make sure that we never take it for granted.

I also have some ambitions, one in particular, that I’ve never fulfilled and that now needs my attention. I think we all know what that is, so I shan’t go on. Although I’ve astonished myself with some of the things that I’ve done over the last few years, such as orating at Speakers Corner more than once or giving evidence to MPs in the Houses of Parliament, there are things I’ve been putting of for no good reason than that they are a bit scary. Now is the time to go towards the fear. Discovering the joy of the fountain pen is a part of that, I think. Maybe getting a Snowball mic as a wedding present is another part of it. Hard to say, but I’m sure it will become clear as time marches on.

I like new starts. I like reinventing myself. I like change. I like clean slates. I like the fact that my future is currently a great unknown. It’s like a great big blank page, just ripe for the doodling.

(Cross-posted from Kits and Mortar.)

Ever thought about converting a chapel into a cosy little house? Or driven past a derelict barn and wished you could renovate it? Have you taken the plunge and bought a chicken shed that’s just oozing potential? And are you going to do something green with it?

Well, I had a call from a lovely chap called Greg Goff at Twofour Broadcast this morning who’s looking for an eco-rennovation project to film for a new series called House Wrecks to Riches. The team are currently filming a number of builds, including a warehouse, a windmill, a milking parlour and a lighthouse, and Greg is really keen to find a green project that they can add to their list.

The programme will follow a project from the very beginning, so you should have planning permission and be ready to rock and roll, but not have quite started yet. The production team will then come and have a look round the existing building and talk to you about what you’re going to do with it. They’ll then film through until the end of the year, which will hopefully be enough time for you to reach completion!

Your project doesn’t have to be huge, it just has to be green – and part of the interest will be in seeing how you interpret the idea of ‘environmentally friendly’. One thing I’ve learnt in the short time Kits and Mortar has been around is that ‘green’ definitely means different things to different people. The key thing is that green is at the centre of your build. That might mean a reed bed water filtration system, or straw bale building, or turf roofs, or using any other green technique or material.

It also doesn’t matter what you’re intending to do with the finished property, whether you move in to it as your primary family home, sell it on at a profit, or run it as a holiday let. The build can be almost anywhere – Twofour Broadcast are based in Plymouth, so most of England and Wales is within easy reach – and they are following projects on Anglesey, Essex and Cornwall

The programme is going to be presented by Gary McCausland from How to be a Property Developer and Zilpah Hartley from A Place in the Sun.

If you have such a build in mind, and you’re ready to take the plunge, get in touch directly with Greg Goff by email, or phone his direct line: 01752 727528.

There was one closing quote in the blurb Greg emailed me yesterday: “The UK needs 250,000 new homes built every year to keep up with demand. Each year we’re 100,000 short of the target… but there are 750,000 empty properties out there to be renovated.” Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m both delighted and sad to report that we have united Foggle – real name Orlando – with his owner. I’d put a flyer in the local shop and Orlando’s owner had put flyers up near where she lives, and an anonymous person had seen both my flyer and her flyer and had put two and two together. This anonymous person texted me with Orlando’s owner’s number, and also gave my number to her, and yesterday afternoon we managed to get in touch.

Orlando’s owner only lives just across the road, so she came straight over with his cat box to take him home. She was really lovely, just like her cat, and we had a bit of a chat. Apparently I was right to think that he had some Siamese in him – his miaow gives that away. He also has a half-sister (same mother, different father), who has been pining for him. He went missing on Monday, so when I saw him Tuesday I was right to think he was looking distressed and lost (I nearly took him in there and then, actually, and now wish I had – we might have had a speedier resolution to it all).

It was so nice to be able to reunite Orlando with his owner. I was so pleased – I know how awful it is when your cat goes missing, and I know how much I’d worry about my kitties if they didn’t come home at night. On the other hand, I fell in love with him pretty much immediately. He is such a gorgeous cat, with a fabulous personality, something which I think comes from having a caring owner, which she clearly is. He would snuggle up with me all day on the sofa as I worked, follow me around the flat wherever I went, and curl up on the bed with Kevin and I when we went to sleep.

Even though we only had Orlando for three days, I do miss him something awful. So I’m both sad and happy. Sad he’s gone, happy that he’s gone home to someone who clearly adores him.