The most appropriately spent Roald Dahl Day ever

After my huge excitement at finding out this morning that it is in fact Roald Dahl Day today it seemed only right that I should visit The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre at my soonest convenience. Happily I was already heading Buckinghamshire way to work on the exciting design of my new website with a man who knows his Photoshop. So when we should have been sitting down to some serious work, instead, after my not-too-strong persuasion, we were getting into the car and heading off to Great Missenden. I do love my unpaid, money-draining job.
Everyone loves Roald Dahl. Mention his name to any passing person, young or old, and it's likely you'll get an immediate smile and some happy recollections of long afternoons spent reading a favourite Dahl classic. I, of course, also read Roald Dahl, but I have to admit I only actually liked reading some of his books, these were (in order of preference) Danny The Champion of The World, The BFG and Fantastic Mr Fox.

Top secret Brown Sign Mission: Codes, 1984 computers and reusable condoms

I've wanted to visit Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire for some time. I like all things history, war and intrigue and Bletchley Park, where ingenious code breakers spent sleepless days and nights in make shift huts cracking the infamous German Enigma code, has to be the place to go to get all that. A good friend of mine (who also happens to be my ex-boyfriend) volunteered to come with me, good thing too, how else would I have completed the "know your planes - friend or foe?" game with almost 100% accuracy?
Having suffered in the last few weeks from a serious cash flow problem (read: cash non-existent problem) I haven't even been brown-signing very much at all, so I was a bit nervous about talking to Bletchley Park's Retail Manager about my project and the museum. I needn't have worried though, she was very excited about getting her brown signs noticed, loved the thought of more visitors happening upon them, proceeded to stick stickers all over us and shooed us out to discover the vast slightly randomness that is Bletchley Park for ourselves.

A "I walk past that sign every day and I've never visited" day

In one of my more random and terribly unsuitable jobs I worked for a few months at the fine chocolatier Mr Paul A Young's (I don't like chocolate, really, not even at all) in Islington, North London. Every day on my way to work from King's Cross I walked past this brown sign for The London Canal Museum and I'm ashamed to say, in all the time I worked there, and despite my obsession with brown tourist signs, I never visited. Shame on me, and what an error that was, I realised today when I paid them a long overdue visit.

I was greeted by a sceptical front desk attendant who found it hard to understand what I was writing a book about, looked at me funny and called a more senior member of staff over to suss out whether I was a threat.

A little history of ice skating

It was the long cold North European winters that inspired the invention of the ice skate. The earliest known example is over 5000 years old and was found at the bottom of a Swiss lake (I assume the chap wearing them rather overestimated their capabilities) and were fashioned from animal bone and leather straps which attached to the skaters shoe. Early records indicate that ice skaters using poles to propel themselves across frozen lakes and rivers “as swiftly as birds” was a common sight in the colder climes across the North Sea. Consequently ice skating was positively old hat on the continent by the time Britons really started getting excited about it in the mid 1600s, when social trends and weather conditions changed the notion that is was just a bizarre activity one hears about foreigners doing in far away lands.

My day at the office

I thought I might share some non-brown-sign related thoughts with you today in the absence of any brown signed attractions filling my waking hours. It has been a funny day, well, an enlightening one at least. I knew things wouldn't be normal when I burst out crying after reading The Man, Richard Branson's morning blog post entitled "in it for the fun, not just the money" (click to read) . The Man describes the drive and motivation behind starting out on your own, and this was the sentence that started those little tears a-comin':
"I don't think that many businesspeople start their business with the idea that they can make a lot of money. Most people feel that they can create something that is going to make a difference to other people's lives – that is how they start their businesses."