Live/Work Blog

Just back from a 3,000 mile jaunt through California: Big Sur - lush Pacific lifestyle, rampaging grandchildren and condors like 5 foot turkeys; Arizona: The Grand Canyon - impossible to describe its awesomeness - go see before you die; Utah: Hopi Indian Reservations, Wild West scenery and excessive Wild West fry-ups on plates the size of Studebaker hub-caps; and Nevada: biggest lump of nothing I’ve ever seen - miles and miles of straight as a die roads through endless desert. And home-workers everywhere. My son runs an import:export business from a cabin 600 feet above the Pacific, surrounded by coyotes and mountain lions; the Hopis run a huge array of enterprises from their lonely homes on the Mesas - jewelry, Kachina dolls etc; friends in the Rockies near Reno run a highly successful publishing business from a stunning house perched on the edge of a 800 foot ravine, while the deer try to break into their veggie patch for the winter strawberries.

We (that’s Her Indoors and me) were blessed with great weather and spent most of our time under blue skies at altitudes up to 9,000 - breathing got a bit harder up there I can tell you. We stopped at Blackwells Corner, where James Dean dropped in for a coffee in 1955, a few minutes before he was killed on Highway 46; the building hasn’t changed a bit and I’m not sure about the coffee either. Wendy’s in Williams, Arizona (we got one street each way and that’s it folks!) serves awful hash browns and the root beer hasn’t improved any, the freight trains are over a mile long and painfully slow, and the welcome and hospitality is affirming of the basic goodness of mankind. Why, in Eureka, Nevada - “The Friendliest Town on the Loneliest Road in America!” - the nice, smiling ladies behind the counter in the General Store will skin and prepare your deer for you and even cut the antlers off to go on the front of your 4 wheel drive.

Nevertheless, worries about the sanity of the American people have been dispelled somewhat (helped by the results of the mid term elections) but I still remain perplexed that such a friendly and generous bunch of people can somehow have burdened themselves with such an extraordinarily dysfunctional political system. But, hey!, San Fran continues to deliver as my favourite US city: light, noisy, irreverent, whacky and very sophisticated in an understated way. And great food!

The FBBs (Fabulous Burmese Boys) were quite pleased to see us back - after an initial obligatory show of feline indifference - and they’re now helping me again with mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy typing.

Nuff said; I’m back in the black plastic command post, trying to see the screen from behind a lump of over-friendly cat, working my way through hundreds of mostly useless emails, hitting the delete key as though zapping a force of Klingons . (I wouldn’t mind all the Viagra emails so much if they just tried to spell them right!), and catching up on developments For example: good old Live Work Network comes up with some good stats: one in ten of us work from home and single people are less likely to be home-workers than married ones. Which leads me to ask all those single home workers out there: do you get lonely, missing the peer support, the buzz, the awful coffee? What you gonna do about it? Imagine if you lived in Nevada - 70 miles for a cup of mediocre coffee. Or a deer carcase.

Sod’s Law for Homeworkers # 4: Small and scrappy bits of paper with vital phone numbers (and tips for the 3.30 at Doncaster) move around in the night and burrow, the depth of descent into the strata directly proportionate to the importance you attach to finding them. This is especially true if you’ve been away for a week or so.

Now listen, what do you do if you want to work from home but haven’t got a room you can call your office or even a safe corner of the sitting room? It’s hard to impress clients with your professional attitude and calm telephone manner when little Johnny (why’s it always little Johnny I wonder?) has the volume up on the Playstation, taking on the mighty Grunt in a battle for the Universe. And I’ve never yet found a way to disguise the wails of a three year old deprived of full, 360 degree attention. The answer? Simple. You move into a shed. There are the Homebase ones that rarely fit, are certainly not insulated and whine in the wind; there are better quality ones (called Garden Rooms) to be found in the back of “Gloucestershire Life” - all blue wollies in green wellies and home made jam - and then there are those designed especially for homeworkers. Check it out. You could be daydreaming in the depths of your dahlias and communing with the fairies at the bottom of your garden. You don’t have fairies? Shame on you!

Anyway, this is going on a bit - hijacked by the Great Western Escape - so phone calls in the loo, and special relationships with little green men - will have to wait until next time. But I’ll leave you with this question: why do you work? Wait until you’re safely under the duvet tonight before you try to answer it!