Dec/080
Discipline & routine
You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.
Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.
Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.
I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.
Dec/082
River Cottage HQ
My short trip to River Cottage HQ in Dorset was well worth the effort. Even if the flights and hundreds of miles of driving on either end made my carbon footprint more of a carbon Jackboot over the last 48 hours.
The event was called Hugh Cooks Christmas and was essentially a 2 hour cooking demonstration by Hugh of some of the River Cottage Christmas dishes, followed by a 5 course dinner comprising all the food that had been demoed. Delicious it was too. The demonstration was as fun and instructive as any cooking demonstration I can imagine. But then again, I've never seen a cooking demonstration before.
I met some great people over the course of the evening. A very eclectic bunch of young & old, foodies & gourmets. I was sitting next to pro cricketer Geraint Jones at dinner. Top geezer he is. He keeps pigs & filled me in with a load more detail about the whole process of raising, butchering and making sausages etc.
And the highlight of the whole evening was getting to meet Hugh himself. He's a genuine hero of mine. He and Stephen Fry are right at the top of the list (although for different reasons). I like Hugh's style, his way with his audience and most of all his ethics and the direction that I've seen the River Cottage brand and TV programme develop over the years I've been watching.
So what did I say when I met him face to face? I said....
"Dude. You're totally my hero, man."
It made him chuckle at least & I suppose that was my intention.