The up side is that you know what you will earn as I said before.

The two downsides are rather different one from the other.

One is that your other clients’ work has to go on hold for longer than you’d ever want them to and leaves you wondering how you will pick up their business again after the contract ends. I’m not sure that I’d be as flexible as some of my lovely clients have tended to be in these circumstances.

The other down side is rather more personal.

We were due to be going on a big holiday at the end of June, and Mrs G had been really looking forward to it.

I have compensated her by buying her and her sister a holiday with Sunshine. You can view the cheapest holidays in Lanzarote on their site and I expected the girls to be offended at the idea, but they were chuffed to bits. I thought of it only because they used to go to the Canaries as teenagers and they were both up for seeing what it’s like now.

Different I suggested!

I dread to think what the two of them will get up to, but I’m confident that they’ll have a lot of fun no matter where they go.

It has been hectic and fun at the same time, I’ll be paid, but not that much – hey ho.

I’ve stepped in for an old colleague at a northern regional building society (there’s not many of them left, but best not mention the name to protect the guilty, or even the innocent).

I’ve been contracting for a few weeks. It’s good as it means I know how much I’ll be paid, I’ll be fed and watered, and pretty much every move I make will be chargeable either to the society or against my own expenses. It’s like going a money without spending any money.

The society first started talking to me about sorting out their branding and the internal understanding of what the brand actually means to them, and how that translates to their customers. I had been doing a day a week with them on that, but then when I proposed a dual pronged approach to internal and customer branding with a programme of workshops for their people they turned around and asked if I’d like to plan and deliver it.

Cool! But you can’t do that sort of thing on a day a week.

The only reason I even know is that I have a friend running and if he had backed out as he intended to last week we would have all been trying to camp in the Derbyshire Dales somewhere. That would have been so grim, and in fact I wasn’t even up for the idea in the first place.

Fortunately Paul couldn’t defer his entry until next year, which is what he was hoping to do, and so he decided that he’d go for it anyway. He had done all his training, but a niggling injury had him thinking that perhaps not running would have made more sense.

To me the idea of running at all is alien, let alone running for several hours. The closest I’ve got was when I was about 20 I ran a half marathon, and actually turned in a very respectable time, but soon stopped pretending I could be even vaguely interested in the sport. And I have to ask – why do it when you’re going to be so desperately behind the pace of even moderately good runners?

Alien. As I said.

I was surprised at myself then when I picked up another Patrick Gale to read straight after Notes from an Exhibition. This one, A Perfectly Good Man is his latest which he is touring at the moment. For a while it didn’t grab me, but the story is now just over half way through and I’m gripped again. It’s the sort of book that leaves yo feeling a loss for the characters when you finish it, or indeed just put it down for a while.

Some of the characters could do with using UK Bathrooms to modernise their lives a little it sounds. It seems that west Cornwall, in fact quite near Lou’s end of the county, has plenty of houses still with outdoor privies and not much more than a sink on the inside.

It’s certainly more interesting reading something that’s set in an area that you know well, and the bits I don’t know in this one I’ll check out next time I go to Cornwall which hopefully won’t be long away.

There are plenty of local characters – Matt the kid who drinks too much and passes out from standing up position, Sennen the French fisherman thrown out of his own navy and named after his place of conception, along with some star surfers too.

There’s also a world class author in Patrick Gale. I’ve known about Patrick Gale for some years, he lives with his other half on a farm near Lands End, but I hadn’t read anything by him until this last Easter. I read Notes From an Exhibition, a tale of an artist in Penzance along with her trials of manic depression, and its impact on her family and friends.

And what a joy to read it was! I sat for the first time in ages and read a hundred pages straight off, loving the words, the emotion, the tender confusion and the gradual build of the family by chapter. I would have loved it whatever, but then the fact that I knew every street and could imagine the influences on Gale just made it every bit more powerful and delightful.

Give it a try.

I found out a bit I didn’t know about Petra then as I asked her if her fella does the work around the house and she retorted “My fella is another woman!” She wasn’t hard or nasty, just told me straight! I liked that – but no funny ideas, you wouldn’t start dreaming of running of with Petra.

Terry, who I know is shacked up with another bloke loved my naivety and confided that neither he, nor Rob, his fella, do a jot of housework, whether that’s cleaning, or putting up shelves or blinds or anything else.

If we weren’t in Chorlton people would have thought we were a right funny old gang, but here we just fade into the scenery. I wonder actually whether this is the gayest area in Britain, probably excluding Soho and Canal Street.

All very well, but that hasn’t solved my problem of how on earth, or more likely who on earth is going to create the degree of magic that’ll make the bloody blinds stay up in the bathroom. Mind you, I have to order them first.

So, no handy man found, but one lesbian discovered. How sweet it can be sitting with a group of friends!

Then as the flats began to sell, and the offices underneath us were occupied, so it became more homely, and most important – warmer!

Now though the flats opposite are lived in to, and so we need bathroom blinds. We opted to have plain, or clear glass in the bathroom and I’m glad we did, so much less claustrophobic in a small space, but it does look at one of the other blocks.

JMG will be ordering bathroom blinds in the next couple of days, and then hoping not to bodge the process of creating whatever magic is required to make them stay on the wall. I have a practical mind, but not practical hands. I know what makes things work, and how they should be attached, or measured, or whatever, but I have little hope of actually using my own hands to deliver what it is.

That fact drives me mad, but I have come to accept it now and just pay the money to get a man who can.

There were a great couple of days last week, proper beach weather right at the start of April. But then came a few bad days, all of it OK really.

But then came today.

We woke with the rain lashing the windows and it has hardly let up all day, in fact it’s worse now than it has been so far.

England needs rain it’s true, but does it all have to fall on the bank holiday weekend? At least I guess we’re in a gorgeous cottage, part of the Cornish Way collection, but just up the road there are a few hundred poor sods camping. Yuk! Imagine how grim and cold you’d feel after a while.

And of course the biggest issue is that it’s just when Brits are looking at the cost of their holidays a bit more, and trying the English destinations that maybe they had forgotten for a while. This ain’t going to help them get back into Britain is it?

I don’t have the answers.

They usually have the answers, especially when it’s a question about their business.

What I do is help them to find the answer themselves.

That way they believe it, and make it happen.

If I tell someone what to do, they’ll only do it if they were also thinking something similar.

But if they come up with the answer as a consequence of me asking the right questions to help them open their own minds we’re usually on to a winner.

Funny old thing that isn’t it. And then I charge them hundreds of pounds for something they thought up themselves.

But therein lies the rub. They wouldn’t have got there without me. And so those hours that I charge for are most likely worth every penny.

That’s because years ago I had no idea which way to turn, but a star ex boss helped me to think it through and find my own answer.

The wedding at the weekend was a great affair, a combination of excellent company, really good food, a special venue, and a free bar, which fortunately for the couple wasn’t abused.

The fella brought his gorgeous VW camper along which I reckon had almost as much attention as the event itself. It’s a old white over a light blue, and has that lovely V that starts at the front bumper and goes the full length of the waist line of the car.

We stayed over and on Sunday I was so glad that we hadn’t over done the booze. We had to go to IKEA and that’s always a trial for me. Going with a bad head would have been horrible. We went to the one in Ashton, and I guess because it was a warm sunny day it wasn’t too busy there. I find fighting the usual crowds a real challenge, which when combined with the over heating and the annoying need to follow the route or get lost all combines to leave an angry JMG.