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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
It’s a kind of work picking your way through op shops (charity shops, if you’re English) and car boot sales. When my wife and I check these places out we both tend to look for different things. She goes for audio books (of which there are a lot more in the UK than in NZ), for children’s toys, sometimes for clothes. I go for books, of course, because that’s part of who I am. But I also check out cufflinks, and paper knives. And we both sometimes look at things like egg coddlers.
It’s hard work. Trawling your way around several op shops is hard on the feet, but trawling around dozens of stalls at a car boot sales is harder still. You have to keep your eyes peeled at all times, otherwise you’re likely to miss a bargain. Cufflinks are so small that it’s often hard to spot them amongst earrings and other jewellery. There are usually a very small number in either op shops or at car boot sales, so spotting them is a bit of a task.
Paper knives are even thinner on the ground, and we’ve only picked up a couple since we’ve been in the UK, but today we found one like an old-fashioned sword with a handle, the type that fits around the sword-fighter’s hand
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Work at the moment consists of walking, walking and possibly more walking. And reading. And blogging. And viewing historic homes. And getting up later than I’m used to. And going to bed later. And visiting relations I haven’t seen for years - or never, in some cases.
This is work? Well, yes, if you regard a sabbatical as part of work then this is work. Or, if you regard a career break as part of work, then this is work.
People who only regard work as the stuff done for forty hours a week (roughly) don’t realise that the weekend is part of the work. Without the weekend, work wouldn’t happen - eventually. We have to have breaks for work to work
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We’ve been to a couple of car boot sales in the last few days, one small because of the threatening rain, and another, the Sheringham Carnival version, full of sellers and buyers. Some of the sellers are full-time
car-booters, and you can tell from the quality of their goods; some of them are just people who’ve cleaned out their garages. Some show their wares off to their best advantage; some seem to throw the stuff in a heap and hope for the best. For example, there was a woman selling jewellery. Not only was all the stock in cases and laid out in such a way that it wouldn’t shift easily, but they were ensconced under a kind of open marquee. On the other hand, one guy had a pile of books thrown - literally - on the trestle table. From my point of view, not only is it a bad way to treat books, even secondhand ones, but it also gives the customers an invitation to throw the books around further. This happens in The Warehouse, in New Zealand, when sale stock is just piled into bins. The customers pick things up and throw them down, until it looks like a tip. Crazy.
It took us at least three-quarters of an hour to go round the stalls, hearing jokes between customers and sellers who know each other, lots of talk about the weather, investigating the stalls with seemingly endless bric-a-brac, quantities of Dick Francis, Catherine Cookson and Mills and Boon, vast amounts of children’s clothing and toys, and stalls with strange collections of militaria, records, ancient household items and old coins.
Of course, in spite of having told ourselves we needed to hold fire on spending any more at op shops or car boot sales, we still managed to come home with children’s toys, a couple of pairs of cufflinks, a paper knife, and some books. All very reasonably priced, but still digging into our funds
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Of course I’m reading the latest Harry Potter – or rather, I’m just having a break from reading it in order to write this.
J K Rowling isn’t the world’s greatest stylist, in terms of writing English, but she gets the story across, and she keeps things clean and tidy so that usually you can read at a fair bat and not have to go back because you’d misunderstood something.
Perhaps more importantly, she’s a top example of someone who’s thoroughly prepared the ground before she’s started to write. It’s all very well having Harry Potter walk into your fictional life on a train, fully-formed, and then find that he’s surrounded by a number of other characters before you reach your destination. But knowing what to do with the characters is always a major task for a writer. I know this from experience
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While we were in Great Yarmouth today, we happened to go into the Docwras Rock Shop where two of the male staff were making rock. The shop was large (the largest in Norfolk I think they claim) and had at least fifteen staff working flat out, either producing rock or serving customers.
When I say ‘rock’ I mean that round hard sweet that’s made in various colours, often has words produced inside, and is very common in English seaside towns.
These two guys worked in wonderful harmony, knowing exactly when to do what stage of the process, and never getting in each other’s way. One of them would have been my age at least, and the other wasn’t much younger. The older was obviously the ‘artist’ but the other was no less able at what he was doing
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We’ve been to a number of street markets since we arrived in England, particularly in Northampton, Bedford, Norwich and some smaller places like Wymondham, and I’m constantly amazed at the amount of work these guys have to do. When I say ‘guys’ I include women as well, since the markets are run pretty much equally by both sexes.
Not only do they have to set everything up in their stalls every day and pack it all away again at night, but they presumably have to procure the produce, whether it be fruit and veges, or cellphones or secondhand books or watches or all the other paraphernalia that goes into running a market.
It’s more than a full-time job, to my way of thinking, and though most of them look as though they enjoy it, you see a number sitting gloomily in their stalls waiting for customers and watching dozens of people passing them by every few minutes
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Working as a guide in a National Trust house must be a popular job as there don’t seem to be any lack of volunteers. In both the places we’ve been so far, there’s been a guide in every room. In Blickling, for instance, that must have amounted to some twenty guides. All of them are informed, all are helpful, all willing to answer any questions you can throw at them. Some of them go beyond the call of duty and will give a full-scale lecture to anyone who’s really enthusiastic.
And they’re all retired people, I’d assume, and none of them are young, so even a four hour stint in one of these places must be very tiring. I don’t know how often any of them do the work - perhaps they only come in once a week. If that’s the case, there must be even more volunteers floating around. The National Trust has over 300 properties on its books: 300 by an average of ten volunteers is 3000, and if they each only worked one shift a week, we’re looking at 15,000 people or more. Phew! That’s some organisation.
Another massive co-ordination exercise is the work of getting the tennis off the ground at Wimbledon. (Wimbledon has dominated the tv screens this last week.) I expect the place has plenty of full-time staff, but you look at those people who stand throughout the games and wonder - how much do they get paid to do that
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My nephew emailed me a couple of days ago to say that there was a three month research job going at Norwich University, and that if I was interested I should apply quickly. However, I don’t want to commit to three months in terms of temporary work, and that would also commit us to being in Norfolk again for three months. Apart from that I had to have a PhD, which I don’t, so that was that. Obviously my nephew thinks I’m more qualified than I am!
But we did do some real manual labour the other day. My brother-in-law had a load of roof tiles arrive, and they were plunked down on his front lawn. He wasn’t too happy about that (he’d been out at the time and my wife and I thought that
was the only place they were going to go easily), so last Monday we set to and shifted them to the back of the house, beside the garage they’re going to go on.
We’ve been lacking in real physical exercise, let alone physical work while we’ve been on holiday, so it was good to shift barrow load after barrow load of the tiles from one place to another, in the sun (and some rain) and generally feel as though the muscles are being used. It’s not easy to make the muscles work while you’re away from home and normal routines. We’re going to have to figure out other jobs like this to do. Travelling in cars, and strolling round National Trustbuildings doesn’t quite cut it
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The vocation of a craftsman jeweller working out of his own shop is now almost extinct. Most people who make jewellery tend to work for manufacturing jewellers who produce wedding rings
, engagement rings and the like in large quantities. The role of the independent artist in this business is vanishing.
Curiously there are perhaps now more choices in jewellery than ever. Where once you might have been limited to the kind of range a certain craftsman might produce, nowadays you can go to a jewellers and find a huge range – almost too much to cope with.
Places like Danforth Diamond have a very large range, and it’s available on the Net. While it beats going into a jewellers and trying to make a decision on the spot, it nevertheless doesn’t decrease the problems. Trying to agree on things like price, design, number of stones, carats in the gold and so forth can be time-consuming. (I’m glad I don’t have to get married again
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365 Posts dating from December 2006
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