Fringe France Diary 2

One of the main things that stuck us when the business was gone was the lack of feeling that seemed to come over us. Well me especially. There was a certain numbness about it that wasn't entirely evident in the beginning. I reckon that not seeing the actual damage being done might have had some impact on my reaction. I wasn't there when the water poured through the ceiling of our shop from above, or when A felt that the shutters were hot when she opened them. I didn't see anything of the shopkeepers on the street pouring buckets of water into the snow in the street, or the piles and piles of stock and papers and equipment being destroyed. A and I have discovered that in a true partnership two people just cannot cry at once. We've tried, it's impossible. One person has to hold the other person, and that just is the way it is. Bad partnerships happen when one person just chooses to cry and be held up, but we didn't have one of those. One of us was always strong. Then the other took their turn. People wouldn't understand when we chose to do things together. Why don't you each do a half week and take the rest of the time off? Or one do one thing while the other does something else? That just wasn't our way. We spent those eighteen thousand hours pretty much together and I woudn't change it.

The next six months were really a bit of a shock. We didn't need to be together all the time, and didn't really have a common goal any more. We adjusted to our lives without our business and got on with things. We went to work and paid our bills and met for coffee and had nice times. My problem was I just started to run out of things to say. People would ask me what I did and I would look at them blankly and change the subject. It wasn't like I didn't have a job, but I had always had a business. It was strange because I was relatively modest about it, wasn't a big self promoter of the business, but it was always on my mind. People were always talking it up for me and that was nice, but I didn't like to advertise. Now though I didn't have a business, or did I? I'm not sure. That was the main thing though, this absence of it. And yet it was still there. It was multi faceted our wee business, more of a feeling we had about things. A nice place for people to go and look at beautiful things and take them home. In our heads it was a concept more than a physical thing. That concept still exists but doesn't have such a sturdy home. We always wanted to seek out the most beautiful things we could and bring them all together to make a lifestyle, a way to be. Not an expensive life, or a flashy one, just beautiful.

There wasn't really any reason why this should change so we decided to carry on. To find those things and collect them together and show people, just in a different way. We collected recipes from mums and grans and tried them all, some good, some bad. We threw parties for friends and made decorations and dinner and watched movies. We went to classes to learn to make things and gave them away, and in doing all this we learned that you can find a sort of peace in these simple things, and a sense of achievement too.

So sans business and lovely income we decided to scour life for possibilites. What can make us happy like that which was once ours? What could give us the same sense of achievement and wonder that we had in abundance only months before? We narrowed down the options. We had never been one for expensive designer clothing or holidays yachting in St Tropez, and so it wasn't that we felt the need to fund a lifestyle of extravagance. Jabbering like monkeys and bursting with inspiration was the order of the day, and we found this in the most unlikely of places. The mission took us to off the beaten track home grown cafes filled with vintage tea sets and the freshest meringue in the land. It took us to beaches to eat ice cream and to start a book club with friends with lots of tasty new recipes to be tried and tested. All of these things can be found and sampled for yourself, whether you live in a city or a tiny hamlet, you have £1 or £1million.

Fringe France diary 1

Once upon a time there were two girls. Having studied together for four years in art school they found themselves drinking lattes in Starbucks and declaring that after the ordeal of their degree they 'could handle anything'. That might well have been the case, but five years on they are finding that they may not have wished upon themselves the challenge of testing that theory.

Sometimes in life you feel that you can do anything. At other times you feel at the top of your game, that everyone around you understands what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes you whisper to your nearest and dearest that everything you are saying is bullshit, but realise that everything uttered by those around you is bullshit too, and that is how these things go, the secret of it all. Having a fixed point to aim towards in the future is the biggest incentive to move forward, to work 70 hour weeks and not blink an eye. To look around you and see that everything is yours, everything was created by you, not another is both overwhelming and, at times, underwhelming. What happens though when that fixed point in the future develops a strange mist just in front of it. A doubt creeps in, a knowledge of the way things really are, for you, and everyone. When you have peers who you admire, envy?, possibly, but ultimately want to stand alongside start to crumble and fall. The truth you sought so veraciously suddenly appears before you and you wish you never knew it. Didn't open Pandora's box. Sometimes, now, all I wish for is that all consuming and ever powerful naivety that told me, us, that we could do anything. The plans that were ours and the empire that would grow was there in the future and all we had to do was move forward. At the time we would dissect other people's success, look for the secret, what is it they're doing? What's the magical ingredient we need to work our backsides off for? Because we would have done it. If someone had said 'work 100 hours a week and don't even think about stopping' we would have laughed, that was no problem, we can do that! But when the road map was uncovered to us we realised that maybe this wasn't the way we wanted to go. There is something to be said for fumbling along in the dark with a smile on your face. But when suddenly the road sign is uncovered and there are still a thousand miles to go, well you have to question things.

A lot of those companies we admired so much seemed to be rotting under the surface. Thousands of pounds in debt, mortage in arrears, not paid staff for a month. We didn't want to be like that. Our wee business was definitely only wee, but we had our souls intact and unsold. There's a lot to be said for that.

But enough of that. A question must be asked, and without the background it cannot properly be understood. What happens when two girls had a company, a life and a plan, and suddenly it was gone? Well for one, they had a sleep. The 7 day weeks and 10 hour shifts can only continue for a certain amount of time. Five years if you were curious. Eighteen thousand hours, give or take. They got jobs and paid their bills. And then they started planning again. Rather more quietly this time it must be said. With much less scribbling on endless scraps of paper. One of them took a month off and escaped to the middle of France. She received delivery of a new laptop the day before she left and hired a car and started to type.