Company News
1st March 2021 Retirement Stage 2
The sun is shining today with the promise of spring. The primroses and miniature daffodils are blooming in the garden, there are lots of buds on everything else and baby birds everywhere. Vaccines are being rolled out and I’ve been working hard behind the scenes. The last requisition from the warehouse has arrived and been dispatched to you and the remainder has been packed, filed away and loaded into the webshop, mainly seeds and Delica but also Tila and a few other odds and sods. I’m feeling much more in control now and am beginning to see the wood for the trees! I have also removed a lot of the sold out items from the webshop to make it easier to see what remains. I’m not promising the stock control doesn’t have any mistakes and like the brood of baby long-tailed tits flitting around the garden, it’s difficult to get an accurate count! It might have been 8 or 10 babies. They can have up to 14 in a nest so tiny that the parents only fit by folding their tails up over their heads and they are always the earliest in the year to arrive in my garden. ...
May 2021 Be Better Than 2020
Happy New Year to you all! Whilst I enjoy being in lockdown I am aware that many of you don’t so I’ll just say – may 2021 be better than 2020 for you. Vaccines are being rolled out so there is light at the end of the tunnel and the sun is shining today. Who knows, by the end of the summer I may be able to start Charisma Beaders again. Something to look forward to. ...
Where Did The Summer Go?
Looking back I realise I haven’t done a newsletter since 10th July. Where did the summer go? I’ve been ‘shielded’ for nearly six months now. When did we change from isolated to shielded? Who decides these names? Rhetorical questions folks. As far as I’m concerned nothing has changed, the virus is still out there gradually spreading through the population. The danger is still there and it will still kill me so I am still using Whistl, it is neither 1st class nor 2nd class, it is what it is and your beads will take time to arrive. The easing of lock-down has been a national economic necessity and lock-down just slowed the progression of the virus to a manageable level for the NHS. I seem to be ever busier, hence the lack of letters, and I don’t have time for funny stories on this occasion I’m afraid. This is just a quickie to let you know that I have booked two more breaks into the diary. It seems a bit quick, I know, but my last break at the beginning of August was a bit of a farce. ...
Website Update
We have updated our website with some bug fixes and improvement on speed. We have done the usual rounds of testing but bugs can still slip by us. ...
Chaos, Sieves And War Zones
Thank you so much for the photos of your beadwork. What a variety of beautiful things you have all been busy making. You also seem to agree with me that life consists of moving things from one place to another. It’s one of those self-evident truths that only occur to us in that split-second between realising that what we are now doing is extremely silly, if not down-right disastrous, and being beyond the point of no return. Mine was rashly tipping 2 big bags of yellow beads into the scales only to realise that one had been 11/00 and the other 15/00. I put them in the ‘think about it later’ box. A little while afterwards someone mentioned that they had read about a bead sorter. A computer search found a nice little tower of different sized sieves and a price well into double figures. I had a little think, how often am I likely to use it, what was most likely to need to be sorted etc. and a browse on the web. I am now the proud owner of a sieve with base and lid which separates 11/00s and 15/00s of any shape excellently and cost me well below double figures. If anyone needs to borrow it they are very welcome. I think a lot of us have been taking this opportunity to sort, tidy and organise. Having done so we should now be saving time looking for things because we know where they are. That’s the theory anyway. ...
Week 13
Well, here I am at the end of week 13. That’s a quarter of the year! Whatever happened to quarter days? They used to be marked by festivals and markets, they were the four dates in each year on which servants were hired, school terms started, and rents were due. When I signed the lease on my first retail shop the rent was payable on quarter days and it was viewed as very odd that I asked to pay it monthly. Now monthly rents are far more the norm. That actually makes me feel very old! They fell on four religious festivals roughly three months apart and close to the two solstices and two equinoxes. The quarter days have been observed at least since the Middle Ages and they ensured that debts and unresolved lawsuits were not allowed to linger on. Accounts had to be settled, a reckoning had to be made and publicly recorded on the quarter days. ...