Gotta love a cold call

I have to share with you my first cold call of 2015 I am rather proud of it. My apologies to anybody who has read the shortened version on facebook. Many years ago I had laser eye surgery from one of the national chains and they obviously have my details still. The operation was a marvellous success and I still have 20/20 vision.

“Good morning, how are you?”

“I am good thank you”

“Good, I am calling from *** with a special offer for you as a valued customer”

“Brilliant, I’ve been waiting for this! How much? do you need a deposit?”

“Well that depends on the procedure sir”

“Top shelf all the way, I want the x-ray option”

“Ha ha oh yes sir that would be nice, do you need glasses for reading?”

“No, not unless its her next door’s copy of Fifty Shades”

“Do you need glasses for driving?”

“No I am pretty much 20/20″

“Are you sure sir, prescriptions change with time”

“Pretty sure as are you, your firm did the work and you have my prescription”

“Oh there seems to have been a mistake”

“No they told me I would get 10% off when x-ray was available, as a valued customer, I’ve been waiting for this call now do you need a credit card”

“Ha, well of course we don’t do x-ray sir”

“What? that’s false advertising, I wan’t the x-ray option stop messing around”

“Well sir it’s been nice speaking to you”

“Look I have had the super hero costume for years now finally they will stop laughing at me for wearing tights to the pub”

“Hello”

“Are you there……..”

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Sketchy options and shortened weekends

A quick check this weekend revealed that my options on the island all still remain. Whilst this may not bode well for the businesses concerned it also reflects the poor state of the trade. In a recent survey of job satisfaction publicans were firmly at the bottom, not just low the trade was the very last entry. I spent some time reflecting on my chosen career and really can’t see why it scores so low.

The hours are long and the financial rewards are low but this, of itself, doesn’t make for unhappiness. I think this cloud of depression is the result of ‘up selling’ and it’s a legacy from the boom of pub companies. Even now the pub companies sell a dream, after all that is their business. In the golden days they would hand keys to anyone who had a redundancy or early retirement cheque and liked a beer. This marketing trapped people in the trade, not having the skills to cope with the business or the love to drive through the tough times they became commercial prisoners.

For the rest of us this is a great trade. Of course volumes have decreased and costs have increased, times seem perpetually tough. The licensed trade is not a road to financial riches, it hasn’t been for some years. It is a road to being part of a community, a place in people’s memories and it can support itself. Most importantly as my mate Andrew likes to remind me “once you’ve been bitten” for some of us it’s just in the blood.

And so it was that on Sunday I was looking at parking options for the, now landlocked, site in Ventnor. Then a couple of hours spent sketching the new bar arrangement which, I must say, looked rather good. Is it the site? Will it be available and achievable when I finally regain some traction and my life comes off ‘pause’? Who knows but it never hurts to be prepared does it. . . .

In other news a weekend of wearing sweat pants has given my knee a much needed chance to heal. Taking no chances I have protected the left knee with a piece of tubular bandage and was most gratified to find it looking good when I got to the hotel last night. I have to take my hat of to Helen for the insightful questioning on Friday. Having stated the obvious about planning and knowing I had to return to work I responded with “it was a long weekend”. Obviously she knows me too well because without a pause she asked which day I had carried out the work, the answer of “Sunday” didn’t help me!

Diesel love and wet toes

Heading home yesterday evening I passed a friend who was heading in the opposite direction. What amused me about this encounter was that said friend looked slightly taken aback by seeing somebody he knew, his female companion did not seem so concerned. This morning I walked into the same friend travelling in the opposite direction, collar up, hat on and dark glasses. We exchanged the traditional “got to stop meeting like this” comment as you do and I continued on my way with a smile.

I’ve known this guy for years, he earns good money and is always happy. I don’t mean that he always smiles or that I only see him drunk I mean that he has a genuinely happy disposition. The thing is that he is also the guardian of a secret that society doesn’t want us to know, he is single. I often, very often, see him walking back past my place in the morning, the ‘walk of shame’ as it’s known. There is no shame of course, not from either party it’s all smiles.

All the stuff about needing somebody at home, companionship and the like is what people say to justify their position. The truth is that the least happy people I know are in relationships or the result of failed ones. I have a friend, a devout petrol head, who has brought a diesel car and he does the same; he is forever explaining how it “feels chipped” or is “just as fast”. The truth is that we don’t need a relationship to be happy but when we are in one we cover insecurity and unhappiness by telling the world how luck we are.

Sure people who are single occasionally wish they weren’t but people in relationships do it a lot more. If you add in the nightly manoeuvres of my pal I would suggest that the single people wouldn’t think about relationships ever after all has anybody ever actually loved a diesel?

In other news, after much deliberation, I have composed a long message and sent it to my estate agent of choice. There is nothing wrong with answering the questions that we produced over the weekend after all. I have no urgent need to pour hard earned money into a chance venue but equally I would be remiss not to evaluate options. There is no business urgency at the moment and there are still hurdles to overcome but it feels great to get a toe wet.

I also have an update on healing. They say that healing is all swings and roundabouts, you gain here and lose there. Some days you are in pain and some days not so much. At the moment, please don’t tell the phyiosterroist, it’s a pain phase. My wrists are doing their best to lock up in inappropriate positions and to wake me in the night. Shaking out the sleepy limbs produces a cacophony of sounds and resultant pain.

My shoulder has taken to slipping into whatever position it is that it doesn’t like when I am asleep and then punishing me for it when I awake. I get the feeling that Ms Nature is not a fan of the current exercise regime but frankly I don’t care. I have had positive feedback on the strength in my handshake and I am defeating jars with relative ease. These are tangible and physical results, real improvements in my life. On the flip side I struggle to lift a kettle without pain and tend to wince when putting a shirt on. If all that Ms Nature has is pain then she is on a hiding to nothing, note that I didn’t say I couldn’t tip a kettle just that it hurt.

Hurdles: An alternative approach

I had a sudden brain wave over the weekend, I know who would have thought it? My mission for the last two long years has been to resolve the outcome from my accident and reposition myself to hit the market again and restart life. I know that there are more hurdles on the way but remain resolute, I just have to keep knocking them down until I get the keys to my pub after all life is just a game isn’t it.

Not being directly in the market does not mean that I don’t keep a watching brief, I have tried to keep my nose out as it where but it has proven far too difficult. So I am aware of sales and movements in the one market that is critical to me but also those in other markets that provide indicators, trends and benchmarks. One constant fear has been the gem, the risk of watching the one offer that is too good to pass up slip out of the market. The licensed trade is a complicated beast burdened by more pessimists than would seem fair so it is not as simple as opportunities being sold, the real concern is opportunities being sold at viable rates. Where venues are taken off the market at untenable or naive prices I consider this to be nothing more than a change of caretaker, so far my opinion has been proven to be right. But what about that little slice of perfect, sold at a realistic price and potentially out of reach for a generation?

There was always a back up of ‘buy and board’ but this presents significant commercial hurdles and as such can only be applied to real bargains. But I have now seen another option, perhaps encouraged by some progress in my return to the market, locum management. Don’t misunderstand me, I do not consider this a viable way to operate a commercial enterprise, but to preserve an opportunity I think that it has legs. There is nothing more soul destroying than working to fund an empty pub, I remember running between meetings and calling Shorty to hear “nobody has been in boss” and still wince at the thought. But like so much in life it is a matter of perspective, I funded the Ship because I believed it could wash its own face and, bless the old girl, she proved me right.

This option has reinvigorated my view of the world and restored my passion, there is a new business plan that enables a holding period if needed. There are three venues that are on the current list and their numbers are all being revisited, not as decision makers in themselves but as gates to see whether decisions should be brought forward. Once again I find that I am astounded by the passion that the subject stirs in me, I keep waking up surrounded by piles of floor plan sketches and scribbled notes on operating costs. The new option is not preferred and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to every option but it does provide a grappling hook to snag the one that is getting away and that is more than I have had for some time.

Beetroot chocolate and ‘him’

It has been an oddly unsettled weekend and I’m actually not too sorry to be returning to the stability of work. I don’t know what it was that sent the weekend askew but I knew no good would come of it from Friday. As most of you know I live alone and I do not own a freezer, there are odd reasons for that which I shall explain later. This means that the visit to the grocery store on the way home Friday is the pivotal point for deciding the weekend menus.

I don’t know if it just me but food is a good barometer of my mood. If I am feeling positive and upbeat I can see a meal in every item that I come across on a shelf. If I am not feeling, well just not feeling ‘right’, there is nothing but effort and waste on the shelves. On Friday I left with two pints of milk and a packet of Minstrels, the later discarded after I ate one and decided that they tasted of beetroot.

For the purposes of completeness let me explain the absence of a freezer in my flat, beware it makes perfect sense to me. When I moved into the flat nearly eight years ago it was a temporary arrangement, at the time it was ‘until I sort my divorce out’ and in my defence that took 6 years. The flat was a furnished flat not particularly by choice but due to limited availability at the time. Everything that came into the flat came by car with my logic being that I could move out with the same uncomplicated method.

The television that I have was selected not for picture or sound quality but for the ability to fit the entire box into my car after it was delivered to Paul’s whilst I was at work. House purchase slipped by and pub purchase became the next deadline, mostly it still is. I may have introduced a ‘soft’ deadline of resolving the aftermath of the accident but there remains a target. Many is the time that I have convinced myself that I should purchase a new television, a freezer or re-carpet but I always change my mind. As much as I love the ocean backdrop and as happy as I am in the flat it is forever an indicator of delay and life being on hold. Somehow I can’t quite bring myself to do anything that could solidify it’s status.

Anyway, having discarded the chocolate I knew the weekend was not going to go well. Don’t misunderstand this, I wasn’t expecting disaster but I had the feeling of disconnect and could envisage spending a lot of time at home. I only left the flat twice on Friday to collect and return a laptop repair. On Saturday I popped in to catch up with good friends freshly returned from their well deserved break. My key-ring now sports a shiny Corfu fob (thank you Emily) and I have to commend the choice of T-shirt which confirms that “I do all my own stunts”. A bottle of Metaxa, the delightful rose tinted Greek brandy is now safely secured at home. I hope that I looked as grateful as I felt, if I didn’t I can assure you that it was not intentional I love you guys!

Three pints on Saturday confirmed that I was not in a sociable mood and I returned to tea and ‘the other project’. Early nights and early mornings oh and tea, lots of tea were the dominant features of my weekend. There is no reason that I can place my finger on for this disconnect. I miss my children terribly, but have for some time now. I am upset that my daughter has not even told me whether she has received the gift I sent for her birthday, but I didn’t really expect her to. The growing list of unanswered messages to my son hurt, but they always have. The whole ‘life on pause’ thing is a heavy weight to haul but it hasn’t changed.

This is another of the positives in the licensed trade, there is no room to disconnect. Sure there is a personality in a pub and it could be said that you hide behind it but their is no room to allow that personality to slip. I guess sometimes when the weight of life weighs heavily sometimes you just need to dissociate from it.

On a more upbeat note can I apologise to the interweb for using it whilst naked on Sunday, I trust I didn’t offend any search engines. The reason that I didn’t have time to get dressed was that I needed to log in to my Lotto account, there was “important information”. I logged in and discovered that I had indeed won on Saturday! Rest assured I won’t let this change me, I will stay as mardy and sarcastic as ever. I will be speaking to my advisors to find the best lager to invest my new found £25 in.

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