Damage Limitation

Hmm.

Actually, that's too small a sound. Hold on...
(Takes a deep breath).

HMMMMM...
That's more like it.

Woke up this morning, and schlumped to the Nazi Scales.

15 stone 3.5.
Hmm...(yes, the small version).

Shrugged, went for a walk - it was one of those early-morning, know-I-should-do-this-really walks, to get me accustomed to the idea of walking longer distances prior to the Night Hike in September.

On the way back, decided...well, no, that's too strong a word...I ambled vaguely into a bank.

Don't know if you've ever ambled vaguely into a bank before. Not sure I have either really - Banks are like swamps, really - you go to them with a purpose, and they're nasty and stick and generally make you dirtier than you could possibly have imagined, and then it becomes a good idea to leave them as soon as is humanly possible, and you do. But today I ambled vaguely into a bank. Because I had a vague, ambling thought. This of course is far less unusual. I have vague, ambling thoughts all the time. Which is what makes this one, in it's own way, a bit unusual.

I'm thinking of starting a business.
It's not like I don't already have a job of course, and am also trying to become a writer, and also, I suppose, to Have Adventures to come home and relate to you lot. I think it's probably fair to say that my attempt to start a business is about as deeply into the arena of the Mid-Life Crisis as I intend to allow myself to go.

Admittedly, I did have the idea a little while ago, before we moved to Wales. Then, it was a different business, and something of a dream, to which I added the vaguest of candyfloss coats as a possible way to get us here. Then a simple, slablike, straightorward way to get us here emerged, and I didn't need to stride boldly into the scary territory of economic self-sufficiency simply to get us to a place where we could be on hand for my folks.

The idea of having a business was re-ignited relatively recently, when a) two of my friends started their own, pretty darned successful businesses, and b) I opened up a writing magazine and saw people charging serious money for a length of old rope that I've been giving away free to friends for donkey's years. Right, I thought. Sod it....I'm going to start a business...

By what is ludicrously in my case referred to as 'profession', I'm a journalist and editor. I've edited all sorts of things, from letters of complaint to academic theses to...well, novels, both my own and those of several friends. And frankly, while as a journo, my heart has never truly been in it, the pro-active pedantry of an editor's life is something at which I can say with no false modesty I rather excel.

(Readers of this blog will be snorting liquids out of their noses at this assertion, given that it is - and I know that it is - positively riddled with typos from start to finish. This, I figure, is the difference between blogging and 'proper' writing. What you get in this blog is 100% from the hip, no-thought-involved rambling, more often than not - it is not a work of literary merit, nor even literary integrity. If it were, I would be all over it, squashing the typos. In fact, I may one day do precisely that, but only at a point when I have time, which is not right now).

Generally, authors who get feedback from me have a tendency to walk away feeling both positive about themselves and their talents and enlivened by my corrections, suggestions, and occasionally insights on their work. When d got the first piece of feedback I ever gave her on something she'd written, apparently she turned to her work colleague and matter-of-factly announced she'd found the man she was going to marry.

Clever sod, my girl...

Anyhow, the point it, when I want to be - I really am that good as an editor, even if what I creatively write is utter hogwash - which as you'll know by now, it frequently is.

Apparently, people will pay you money to do this kind of editing for them.

Who knew?

So I'm trying to set up a little something on the side, for those handfuls of heartbeats during which I'm not Disappearing, or writing, or working, or blatantly sitting on my arse in my jim-jams, wishing I could have a biscuit. An editing agency - that'll be fun, I thought.

Of course, there's no indication in my history to date - or indeed in my bloodline - that I should be allowed to run a business. My grasp of mathematics is, if not exactly woeful, then at least deliciously flexible. I've been known to spend the same £20 three times, and only count it once until the statement comes in. My biological dad (who died of toenails a few years ago - long story) had this same urge to start his own business at more or less exactly this point in his life, and it nosedived spectacularly, plunging us into bankruptcy. True, he was a complete and utter pisshead, but I'm not naive enough to think you need to be a pisshead to fail at being your own boss. All you need is a certain fecklessness, to which I'm more than likely to be prone. The key - as far as I can tell, which, given my grasp of mathematics is probably not as far as it should be - is to limit the potential for cataclysmic damage your decision can inflict. I'm not, therefore, chucking everything else in and just going for it. I'm tinkering, essentially. Dabbling. dipping my toes in the water of business, to see whether anything bites. And if it does, whether I still have a leg to stand on afterwards...

Which is why I ambled vaguely into a bank this morning. Made an appointment to see the Business Manager, and then spotted the name on the business card handed to me by her smiling assistant.

"Sue?" I said. "Sue Surname-not-revealed-in-a-blog?"
"Yeah..." said her assistant suspiciously. " Do you...erm...d'you know Sue or something?"
I chuckled.
"Do I know Sue..."

Well, the truth is, I sort of do, and I sort of don't. Back in my teenage days when I had hair and self-importance, I had weekends at the Rhydycar leisure centre with my brother Geraint, and my pals Sian and Karen Pulley, and a bunch of others whose impact on my life got smaller and smaller as they radiated outward from me, but whose own stories, if you focused on them, were probably far more fascinating and far less trainee-psychotic than my own. And Sue was one of them.

Sue was always...nice. Not offensive nice, not the kind of nice you want to see fail if you're a trainee-psychotic, not sugary nice or deluded nice, just good and nice through to the core. We had several good solid conversations, and I think even then, even without admitting each other into our deeper circles, without ever feeling the need to do that, that we appreciated each other very honestly, and grinned at what we saw.

And - one of the tiny but ultimately satisfying quirks of coming from a metropolis to a parochial town where you happened to grow up - now Sue happens to be Business Manager at the bank into which I vaguely ambled this morning. Couldn't do that in a city.

Came home, popped to the bathroom...decided to weigh-in again.
15 stone 0.25.

Talk about damage limitation - note to self - always do a bathroom trip before official weigh-ins. Turns out I really am completely full of crap...