Once basic survival needs have been sorted, is the greatest challenge facing man to be content?  Happy even. So why does it seem to elude so many of us?

It’s not that I’m unhappy, but it seems to have taken yonks to discover what I really want to do.  And the secret for me lay in working out what I would do without being paid.  What I choose to do in my ‘spare’ time.

I think the confusion arises from the basic premise that the way you earn money has to be called work.  An activity, or location, where you earn the money you need to live, and hopefully a few pence left over to fund a bit of fun, peace and happiness.  Those two weeks in the sun with the family for the annual get-away.

Are we really only allocated 14 days of fun a year?

Why can’t we do what we love 24/7?  And if we did maybe we wouldn’t call it work.

It’s easy to believe that people like Mother Theresa and Richard Branson are doing what they love.  Lives on purpose.  But I guess I needed to see a bit more of the average joe before I could believe.  The solution for me?  The National Geographic Channel.  Mark and I have almost given up watching TV, a) too busy, and b) trying to spend our time doing something worthwhile.  The result is that we lost touch with the rest of the world.

And National Geographic is a value way of swapping time for personnel development.  In just one short hour we watched blokes whose lives revolved around tracking and measuring freash water fish in Mongolia.  In this programme in particular they were on the tail of a Monster Trout.  This was more than the usual ‘it was this big’ experience because the presence of the mega trout would demonstrate that the ecosystem of the river was functioning as it should be. The bloke who found it was ecstatic.  Truly over the moon.  The sort of joy you can’t buy.

Do you think he calls this work.  I doubt it very much.  So the only question now is why not me?  Why not you?

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One of my challenges after I left employment was losing the work-place routine – my contract of employment which put the structure into my working hours.

Ironically the stifling nature of working for someone else, which often prompts the flee from PAYE, is the very tool which saved us from overwork.

Initial joy at waking up to new found freedom, means we can forget the positive apsect of this workplace structure. Let me explain what I mean.

When I left local government after 20 years, what I relished was the control of my own routine.  If I wanted to stay up until the small hours – fine – it was up to me what time I got up the next morning.  Freedom.  The problem is that I also lost the boundaries which told me to stop working because I was no longer being paid.  When you work for yourself, you are always on duty.

So how to switch off effectively?  Christopher Howard stresses the importance of always taking 1 hour for yourself each day.  But what happens when this isn’t enough?  Do you take a day, a week or a month?  What if you cut your break too short and undo all the good work you’ve aleady put in doing nothing?  But let’s also get real, if you need to pay the mortgage you want to spend little time as necessary mooching around doing nought.

Well  I read a fantastic tip the other day which I wanted to pass on, and I’ll tell you why I like this technique in particular. With this very simple procedure you take only the time you need to regroup and after that you’re soooo bored you just have to get going again…all you do is this…

Turn off everything like the TV, radio and your PC’s.  And the phone.  You are now all alone with yourself.  Oh Grief! Total shutdown.  Sit in a chair in a room on your own, with the door shut, and do nothing. Really nothing.

And stay like that until you want to get up and do something.

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I’ve just caught the tail end of a film – 50 First Dates – a sort of Ground Hog Day turned around, and it’s rather got me thinking.

Adam Sandler plays Harry, a marine naturalist who falls in love with Lucy, a girl who looses her memory each night as she sleeps.  Each day Harry woo’s Lucy and each day they fall in love. But when Lucy wakes the next morning with Harry at her side, she’s forgotten everything and instead of recalling a night of passion she remembers nothing and thinks she’s woken up beside a stranger.

Fortunately Lucy is an avid journal keeper and so each new day she can follow her own story as their love grows.  Phew!

And then she decides to burn her journal.  Or there wouldn’t be the necessary break up crisis to add the trauma into the tale.  Apparently she does this to let Harry lead a full life without all the hassles of living with the memory monster.

So they part with distraught Harry taking off on his sailing ship.  But not for long.  Harry returns to find Lucy plagued by recurring dreams of a mystery man.  Strangely enough Harry has a solution which involves them getting married and having a daughter and living forever on his sail boat. And here is where it gets interesting for me…every morning Lucy wakes up to find a video tape and player at her bedside which shows the story of her life as press cuttings of the car accident which caused her memory loss; a movie of her wedding and pictures of their daughter.

With no clues, apart from her morning ‘scrapbook, about where she lives or what her life is like, Lucy walks over to the window and gasps in wonder.  Her bedroom window is a port-hole and her first stunning view of her world is of the glaciers of the Antarctic.  When she goes up on deck she meets her husband and daughter for the first time.   Every day for Lucy is filled with awe as she discovers an amazing world and beautiful family.

Shouldn’t every day start with this wonder?  The world magical, bountiful and thrilling.  Any one of us could live the magical life of Lucy and her little family. So why don’t we?  Why are Mark and I working for 16 hours a day with a stolen 30 minute trot through the woods as our only connection today with each other and the outside world?  And then I realised…it’s all about possessions.  Are we struggling to hang on to our stuff and striving to get even more stuff, which we’ll have to sweat out even more energy to keep hold of? -

Something has to change because life moves too quickly and it rattles on regardless of what you’ve got planned.  It’s not waiting for you to catch up.

Now I’m certainly not considering the living afloat thing – sea sickness has shut off that little avenue – but it is time to regroup. Just off to have a little chat with Mark.

Who says there’s never anything useful on the TV?

We’ll see what we shall see…

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Had a fantastic massage today.  If you’ve never had a Thai massage before then you won’t know that it’s like a normal massage, but with a bit of body bending and stomping up and down on your back thrown in.  Thrown being the operative word.  It’s certainly great for getting the lymph moving around the system, and all the toxins where they should be  – on the outside.

As I’m lying there trying to think about something else apart from the pain, my mind started wandering back to our very first visit.  Each month Mark and I travel to London to host an Online Marketing Group of internet marketers and business builders who meet in the secret back rooms of Foyles Bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. Fantastic Cafe by the way.

Just up the road is the start of Oxford  Street and its sprinkling of bauble shops selling puce faux leather handbags, fish net stockings, purple sparkly shoes with 10 inch stiletto heals, and mirrors you can’t actually see yourself in because most of the glass is taken up with a picture of Elvis riding in a Double Decker bus.  (Nice dark wood frame though).  Three floors up and above one of these glistening Emporia of Tack  is the Thai Massage Parlour.  Plaster hangs off the walls of the reception and the toilet has the washing machine and tumble drier stuffed in the cubicle alongside the WC.  No ventilation adds to the mouldy atmosphere, as do the damp towels. The massage girls hanging around in reception all looked about 10 years old and each one could comfortably fit, whole, into just the one leg of my jeans.

We were the only customers.

A wall poster advertised ‘two girls for just £70 for the hour’.  Bargain.  And our first thoughts? Knocking shop.  I had visions of everyone in reception giggling as we were led off into separate rooms for our ‘massage’.  You can be sure that if that did happen, then I wouldn’t be sharing; so that brings me to the two points of this story, and here they are…

1.  I was expecting to see underworld seedy and so that’s what I saw.

2.  I should have turned on my heal, grabbed Mark by the arm, and made a swift exit before the bloke behind the reception, who was very clearly the pimp, decided to do something nasty to silence us before we could spread the word to the relevant brothel elimination squad.

The ‘girl’ who massaged my neck was called Pai.  She was 43 and lived in Catford with her husband and two teenage children. She had started her training with the Monks in Thailand at aged 7.  She quickly spotted the chronic shoulder problem I’d been suffering with for over a year, and was still taking knock out drops for; and then she sorted it out.

Pai made more progress in that short session than the combined forces of the NHS, private consultants and the National Osteopathy Centre had managed in over a year, and for a lot less cash, time, pain and frustration.  As we were leaving an hour or so later, the parlour was filling up with the Massage Therapists and Physio’s turning out from nearby London gyms, fitness studios, osteopaths and clinics and who visit at the end of their working day to get their own cricks and pains sorted out ready for the next day.

So WISIWYG does work.  What you see IS what you get – IF you don’t look beyond your expectations.  I saw a brothel and that is how it would have been forever crystallised in my memory had I not decided to risk all by giving it a go.

Here’s to peeking out from behind the settee…

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For those of you who don’t know, I spent 20 odd years in local government.

Before you groan, on the plus side it gives a fascinating insight into the microcosm that passes as a life for some people.  These are the infuriating but hapless souls whose make their days glorious by complaining to the Council.

I truly believe that the magnitude of what you worry about sets the tone for the size of your life.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from this lot I’m about to describe.  All of these are true complaints not only received by the Council but investigated extensively because that is the unfortunate nature of some Councils – an overwhelming fear of saying no.

If you are wondering why you should care two hoots about these sad wingers then consider this…all the time the Council is looking into the whining of these burks, you are paying more Council taxes and the real issues are not being sorted.  It matters.

If you can sense a bit of a rant here – well you might be right, but it’s anger directed mostly at me for staying in this environment for so long. Goodness knows why I didn’t leave sooner.  But that’s a story for another time. Fear is a terrible master.

I was going to change the names of these wallies.  After all, I don’t want to be sued.  And then I thought – how on earth will they ever find out?  All their time is spent gawping out the window snooping on what their neighbours are up to in case someone, somewhere, might be having fun. They really are not going to be on the internet looking for information about the world. So here goes…

Mr Adams, a delightful little person.  His main gripe concerns (note the present tense please) 3 acres of privately owned land surrounded by 8 foot hedges and open fields.  There is neither public access or visibility.  Apparently the owner is storing some rubbish on it.  Two Court Warrants and a full investigation later, which involved the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO), it was established there was no rubbish on site.  Mr Adams would need to trespass to see anything on the land at all, such was the visibility. Estimated cost in officer time, court costs and general malarky – £10, 000.

Mr Adams is still complaining and the Council is still responding.  About the same issue. He lives 3 miles from this house.  This time it’s the turn of the Environment Agency.

Miss Peabody continues to complain about a house which has been developed where she alleges the ridge height of the completed development was going to be 6 inches higher than it should be.  Please note her complaints were arriving before the house was actually started.  There was some flattened earth when she set off with the moaning.  At this stage the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) got involved.  Letters and officers went back and forth from the site in the coming year until finally the house was complete.  The Council paid for the completed development to be surveyed.  The ridge height was 4 inches lower than the agreed plan.  Total cost of this moaning I estimate at £11,500.

How to pick a winner?  That will have to wait until next time because I’m going away to have a think…

Who was it who said “Don’t sweat the small stuff.

And it’s all small stuff.”

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