Crisis!

It never rains but it pours.

After postponing our departure for Seattle by two weeks, so that I could recover properly from my appendicitis, my sister-in-law announced a few days ago that she no longer wants to carry out the fulfilment for mirrormirror while we’re in Seattle.

So now we’ve got two weeks (two weeks!) to find someone else. 

Is it you?  Or someone you know?

The ideal person will be thorough and organised, enjoy working with beautiful things, have enough spare space for a packing table and some storage space for stock (surprisingly little as most of our products are quite small), have a couple of hours spare a day and probably live in London or the Home Counties (the UK at the very least!)

It would be a perfect for someone who is freelancing or building up their own business and who would like to have a solid and predictable wodge of cash coming in each month, or else a mother at home with a young family.  By its very nature, the job is extremely flexible and would fit round all sorts of other activities.

I think I might have some people lined up from January onwards, so my most pressing need is for someone to cover the two months up until Christmas – though obviously someone who wanted to do it long term would be even better.  And if they wanted to get involved in other aspects of the mirrormirror business then that would be the icing on the cake.

Please email me if you think you might be able to help, and I can send you a more detailed job spec.

The Chinese characters above supposedly reflect the old adage that the Chinese pictogram for ‘crisis’  is a combination of the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. However, knowing my luck at the moment the characters above are probably saying something like ‘fuckity fuckity fuck’!

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Italian interlude

So on Friday I had a bit of a dilemma. 

I was still feeling rather weak and sorry for myself and the hole in my abdomen was still somewhat painful, but we also had tickets to fly on Saturday morning to pay a whistlestop visit to my relatives in Italy. 

In the end I decided to ignore the commonsense option and go to Italy.  I hadn’t been for three years and my elderly aunt and cousins had never met the Minx, and I really wanted them to do so before we left for Seattle.

My relatives live in Cuneo, a largish town at the foot of the Alps, equidistant between Turin and the French border – a couple of hours’ drive from both the beaches of the Riviera and the slopes of Mont Blanc. With its spacious squares, colonnaded avenues, baroque palazzi and Art Nouveau patisseries, it is light years away from the typical Tuscan hilltop town of crumbling stone and fading paintwork which springs to most peoples’ minds when they think of Italy. The region is richly agricultural and renowned for good food and fine wine, and the town has a well-fed, contented, self-satisfied air, with none of the danger and excitement of say, Naples or Sicily. 

I just about made it through the weekend on adrenaline and painkillers, but was so glad we went because Cuneo is where I always feel closest to my mother.  She died twenty years ago of breast cancer but was born and spent the first half of her life in this town near the mountains and everywhere I look I see vistas she would have known and loved. I still think about her everyday and have missed her enormously since the Minx was born.

I chatted a lot about my mother with her sister, my aunt, who is now one of the few people who remember her well.  We spent an afternoon in Arione, a stunningly beautiful Art Nouveau pasticceria which doesn’t look like it’s changed since it opened in 1923 and must have looked exactly the same when my mother lived here.

After being spoilt rotten all weekend, we left feeling well-fed, contented and self-satisfied, and although I’ve been feeling very tired since we got home, it really was just what the doctor ordered.

I didn’t take my camera out and about with me, so you’ll have to make do with not very good images found online.  Off to get my staples out this afternoon.  I think I can finally say I’m on the mend.

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