sniff splutter sniff

Off to work for me today. Lucy and The Rs were here with Davies and Scarlett in the morning and my Mum was here in the afternoon. Ady’s been complaining of a cold for the last 2 or 3 days and during the course of this morning I started to feel a telltale lump in my throat and a sniffle started to manifest itself which by lunchtime had me concluding that a) I was ill and b) I felt ill.

It had been a busy and rather chaotic morning. A new assistant librarian started a couple of weeks ago and is clearly keen to ‘put her stamp’ on things. She is young, fairly earnest and as librarians go probably almost quite dynamic ;). Anyway she’s made a couple of small layout changes which even I, with my whole 8 months experience at 11 hours a week can see make no sense at all and are actually plain stupid. So, bizarrely, along with all my colleagues I felt really quite irritated by this and personally affronted at it. When I was at Clinton Cards one of my favourite quiet period pastimes was to reshuffle the layout of the shop and many a happy afternoon was spent with all the soft toys in the middle of the shopfloor while we redesigned the layout and moved whole great sections of the shop around. At Bhs we rotated great chunks of the shop floor on a very regular basis with swimwear at the front during January to April and chunky knitwear from May to August (and no, I am not entirely joking 😉 ), January and July and the various mid season sales meant all reduced stock was brought to the front, Christmas party wear and big winter coats took floorspace in the winter, the Christmas ‘Shop’ took over half of womenswear from October onwards and we created a whole island of novelty socks twice a year in menswear for Fathers Day and Christmas. Oh and we had a portable umbrella stand which we used to wheel to the front of the shop every time it rained 😆 So I guess I’m internally struggling with a) it not being my job to decide what gets moved about any more and b) it being a blatantly stupid move anyway! Oh and c) feeling ill so being irrational 😆

I wandered around the shops very half heartedly for 20 minutes or so before buying a bottle of coke and a jam donut for my lunch in the hopes that a combined sugar and caffine high would suffice to get me through the afternoon. Then I went and sat at a pc for half an hour and updated the links page on my blog.

The afternoon was rather better, several of us were bored so we entertained ourselves by singing mana manah from the Muppet Show and discussing camping trips and how our own garden might just be the very place to spend next week 😆 Oh and I did lots of cutting out of green paper leaves to form the display of a big tree with every child who finishes the Big Wild Read having their name written on a leaf and added to the tree. Very Blue Peter 😆

I came home to a very tidy house but Mum wanted to talk. Not listen, just talk. So I fed the children, bathed the children and listened to her monologue all the while fantasising about lemsip but knowing that cold and flu remedies are an evil that I should stay away from – I have learnt my lesson in the past with the siren song of the beechams!. Ady got home, Mum left, I went out to the swimming pool to pay for Davies’ lessons in September (Dad had given Mum the money to pass onto me). Then I had a very late dinner and watched Torchwood which made me cry which didn’t do much for my dripping nose really.

And I’m sure I had much more I wanted to say but I can’t because I have to go to bed immediately, before I succumb to the nightnurse!