October 3rd

Tuesday October 3rd

There are two tricks to successfully surrendering to the expansion of letting your world shrink. One is to build in some daily exercise and the other is to not let your brain shrink along with it.
Okay three, get over the feeling of being on a day off and remember to get enough work done so that you don't get sacked.
Four, tell people how busy you are and how great it is to get back time in your day (don't tell them it's from not having to get out of your PJs until lunchtime). There is a blessed anarchy to having an audio meeting in your pants. Particularly if your company was founded by a control freak who wouldn't let women wear trousers or men wear beards.
There is nothing recorded on how he felt about women with beards.
Or men in frocks.

It's important to build reality checks into your day so that when you find yourself becoming obsessed with how many steps are on your wee step-counting thingy when you walk to the local Somerfield and back, you can reel yourself in. Somerfield, what a lovely name for a shop. Like some ancient waiting room before Valhalla, with two for one offers. And only 4484 steps to get there. I wonder how many steps to get to Valhalla. Seven comes to mind or three and now I'm thinking of Showadawadday, I don't know why, but I fear that step one perhaps is 'you find a girl to love'. Or is it 'find someone'? Works for me, but easier said than done. And as with expanding your world by allowing it to shrink, the trick is not to look, while at the same time keeping your eyes peeled. For you never know when a looker will cycle past you and wobble a double take as you walk to the library. How very Geisha. Making cyclists wobble.
Although the same effect could no doubt be attained by jumping up and down in the manner of a chimpanzee, one hand scratching the head, the other curling under the oxster.
I've never actually seen a chimpanzee do that.
But there aren't many in Aberdeen.
Not of the Simian variety at any rate.

One of the downsides of home working. There's nobody to ask about lyrics and 70's bands and if you can't be arsed googling pretty soon you'll be stuck with half thoughts and crap tunes in your head for the rest of the day.
Solution. Listen to radio 4. The Zen channel. How they think up their bizarre variety of articles (can you have articles on the radio?) I do not know. It's a constant surprise and delight. A major benefit of working from home, not having to listen to time wasters and codgers at the foul tea machine, but the dulcet tones of Jenny Murray and some bloke on the Galapagos Islands sitting next to a loudly yawning bull seal. Maybe he was sitting on it and that's why it was making that noise.

Meanwhile the first of the geese are here this week, squawking and squabbling their directions to where that lovely field was they went to last year. On Autumnwatch they called the V of geese a skein. Like wool. They do look a bit like the universal purl stitch. Geese purling across the sky. Knitting the Autumnscape. I like that.

Autumn in all it's sounds, and I can relish in them in my home office. No photocopier churning out forests for time wasters here. And a gibbous moon shines through a twilit window. What is it about the word 'half-light' that makes me want to play Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel?
Home working.
Bliss.