Home comforts

I'm sitting on my big furry cushion on the floor and have become rather accustomed to sitting on the floor lately because this is what I do when I need some kind of urgent change.  It's the equivalent of when Bagpuss puts on his 'thinking cap' (a literal thinking cap) to really figure something out.  I'm hoping it will eventually work out for me.  It's been a bit cold and gloomy in Praha over the last few days and I think it's starting to infiltrate my brain.  Not only that but things are on the point of spiralling out of control financially as so many meet-ees have cancelled recently and are continuing to do so, which is more than I can afford.  Something must be done.

In the meantime, while I figure out what on earth that 'something' can be, I can at least reminisce about how I was able to look after myself better when I had money for nice chocolate and some reasonable Czech white wine. (Thankfully, that was only last week and I still have a bit of both left.)  I don't have the money to buy magazines anymore, and my Hearst magazine subscriptions have yielded all of 3 copies in the year since October so I'm furious with them (but I digress...) so I have taken to re-reading old magazines and books I've read before in order to keep surrounding myself with little bits of inspiration and comforting ideas.  I even took to the traditional 'old spinster' comfort of a hot bath and a bunch of things to read.  

As you can see I added the Slovakian chocolate and Czech white wine (in a champagne glass to pretend I'm living the high life) to give me the full relaxation experience:

If I'm going to descend into spinsterdom, then I may as well do it in style.  And I feel that this is indeed what awaits me because the cowboy is certainly, lovely as he is, not someone I could live with for any great length of time, especially being that I'm self-employed and work largely from home.  I pointed this out to him recently, in fact.  Most couples, I assume, have less of a hard time deciding to move in together because, for a start, there's the no-brainer of saving on the rent, but secondly, because a shared space is fine as long as you only have to use it in the evenings and at weekends.  But if you need it all day long as a studio, bedroom, practice room, library, writing room and chill-out space at the end of a long day, it soon becomes unbearably small to share it with anyone else.

I'm so glad that I do now live on my own.  Finally.  It was a long time coming.  I have had some 'interesting' flatmates from the past, one of whom used to put her hair in a towel when she came downstairs to do any cooking that involved onions because she didn't want her hair to smell of onions.  Another lived in the room next door to me and when he wasn't playing his own songs on guitar he listened incessantly to Radiohead.  Another had a dog who she palmed off to a friend she managed to get to come and live with us so that this friend ended up looking after her dog for her.  She was particularly unhappy and so was the dog.  Another had the most repulsive, smarmy boyfriend ever, who left the bathroom in a state which you would only imagine possible if the abominable snowman had just used it.  And another has become a well-known pop star in Denmark.  Wow.  There were some characters.  I could write a book about them...but I'd rather not.

So it's back to figuring out another source of income somehow.  Though I suspect a square of that Slovakian chocolate would do wonders for my brainpower right now, so I might just have to sneak into the kitchen and retrieve it from the fridge.  (Tip:  living alone is great, but the downside is there's no-one to judge you on your intake of chocolate so you'd be better be sure you've got fairly phenomenal willpower or at least, good old fashioned British self-restraint.)  I'm doing aerobics later, so it's ok.  Honest.

Tired as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

You know that level of tiredness where you just end up on the verge of tears for no good reason?  That's my day in a nutshell today.  I got to that point by about 4pm when the cloudy, drizzly, miserable weather, coupled with the already fading afternoon light just got to me too much.  And I had my most frustratingly difficult, but well-meaning (those are worse than the arrogant ones) meet-ee in half an hour.  In the end, maybe my surrender to my total and utter exhaustion took over and granted me a sense of humour to cope with it.  Somehow I managed to smile more and be kind enough to get through the whole thing.  Even when she admitted she'd forgotten to draw out my fee from the cash machine and would have to go and get it and bring it during the next meeting.

For ten minutes of that following meeting, I wondered if she would ever come back.  Had she perhaps realised how much I had started to despair at the meaningless, lack of progress of our meetings and had decided to do me out of my final payment before never returning again?

Actually, no.  She did come back, with the right amount.  And I made it through my last meeting of the day, discussing the advantages of space travel as an entrepreneurial venture, where Concorde had failed.  Very different things, I know, but all part of the world of aviation and technology.  We even both agreed that if we had a spare £127,000 we would probably want to try Richard Branson's spaceflight experience for ourselves.

Seeing as I also had an informal kind of Czech lesson today (with someone who has been a friend but has been away for such a long time now, I'm not sure what we are) I am a little dazed, ashamed at my abysmal level of Czech for someone who's been here a year, as well as shattered now.  I even talked about the little discrepancies in my life that are becoming less and less viable to ignore, and still I stayed in control.  I am utterly amazed that I didn't actually burst into tears in front of someone, especially her, but maybe that's what happens when you're on the last of the emergency reserves of energy - your body decides what extra energy it can afford to lose and overrides the usual capacity to cry and says, "nope, that's of no use to you now".

It's just as well, as tomorrow I will be cut off from society (i.e. I'm off to "the mountains" with no internet access) and thrust into a world of assembling flat-pack furniture into things that actually resemble furniture (hopefully) in order to help the architect settle into his new holiday retreat flat.  I only hope the sofa fits around the hallway and through the living room door, as I've had a sinking feeling since the weekend when we looked at possible sofas, that that item of furniture could be a calamity just waiting to happen.

The 'donate' button and other emotionally blackmailing things

It's a miserable day here in Praha.

And that's not just how filthy my windows are.  (Though they are rather dirty, aren't they?)

I'm wondering why she's so desperate to live up to London's reputation.  Somehow, in the midst of all this horrid weather and after a tough evening's meeting with a guy who seemed to think it funny to suggest bigamy was a good and, get this, "natural" idea, I am reaching breaking point.  ,,Tak dost!"  I have had enough of getting nowhere, being treated like a low-skilled manual worker and being paid the equivalent of a trained monkey, I am 'making some changes around here...'  Which all sounds, quite frankly, rather frightening.  So get a mug of Lapsang Souchong tea and a biscuit and hear me out...

I've put a 'donate' button on my page (and am currently wrangling with the paypal people to sort out linking my bank account to it properly because it's being difficult, but hopefully that can be resolved one way or another) because I just thought I should let it sit there and see what the faeries bring.  On the other hand, if the forces of nature and the universe in all its wisdom (or whatever) have treated you favourably lately and you find yourself in a period of financial abundance, people are free to offer a little donation-ek (if we're going to Czech-ify it) to help me find time to go to a cafe and write, or even buy a magazine or a book to read and help me amble along with this attempt at creative writing (or humourless drivel, whichever way you see it) for many more weeks to come.

If it's any incentive at all, I'll make a note of any donate-ees and I promise to email them an original and previously unpublished piece of writing of mine as well as a scanned copy of an original piece of my loosely-termed 'artwork' as a thank you to whomsoever sendeth the donation-ek.  The amount is entirely up to you to decide on.  

If you want an 'adopt a goat in Somalia' - type low-down, here's a quick guide: 

£1.40 buys Ms Platform Edge a coffee in the bookshop cafe

£1.60 covers the extravagance of a hot chocolate instead

£10 (yes, sadly, it's that expensive here) will buy her an imported UK or American magazine or novel.  

And if we're really pushing the boat out: 

£17.60 enables Ms Platform Edge to cancel a peak-time meet-ee so she can have almost two hours (as the meeting would be an hour and a half, the preparation about 20-30 mins) of precious writing time, instead of having to present and prepare things.

(Oh and, the delightful paypal people, in their infinitely superior business acumen to me, charge me 20p plus 3.4% on all transactions.)

I trust this may be the beginning of things moving onwards and upwards for all of us in these dark and chilly days.   But if not, I'll just go and make another cup of Lapsang Souchong tea and whine quietly to myself about how little I earn while eating too many pepparkakor biscuits.  It's ok.  No, really.