I am reminded what normal life is like for many people as I’m reluctantly awoken to the sound of the alarm at 05:45 on a Monday morning. I lie there in the dark, cocooned in the warmth of the duvet, calculating to the minute how long I can stay there ignoring the repetitive trilling of my iphone as I repeatedly hit the snooze button. I need to make the shower, wash and dry my hair and stuff a piece of toast into my face and be away by 06:30. The drive down to the West Country is long but uneventful and it’s a long time since I’ve been on the road early enough to see the sunrise. I arrive for my meeting in Bristol at 10:15 and during introductions hope the desire for a caffeine hit isn’t written too obviously across my face. Back home at 21:20 having detoured via the TSB HQ in Swindon to meet some of the innovation team I make a sandwich and sink into the sofa. The house, without Monty the cat who died last week, feels even more silent than usual.
Another busy and productive week has passed. A lecture run by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Cambridge Judge Business School is interesting and at the networking event afterwards busy and fun. I talk to a variety of people both in the capacity of entrepreneur and research associate. I am asked if I would consider mentoring start-up companies set up by students at the business school. Two people ask for my resumé. I seem to be spending more time in Cambridge both professionally and socially and later, as I walk down Trumpington Street after a glass of wine at the Hotel du Vin, I feel more and more drawn to make the move there.
I am waiting to hear from the card company following the submission of my photographs (it’s only been two days) but it doesn’t trouble me too much as the NeverTooLate brand is starting to take firmer shape in my mind. I am rewriting some of the blog into chapters that are suitable for book publication and today between projects I spent a little while browsing the web for agents who were looking for submissions and who might be interested in my kind of writing. Companies like Random House won’t accept manuscripts directly so an agent (unless one wants to self-publish) is a prerequisite. The idea to link the images in the greeting card range to the NeverTooLate Adventures on the website and then to a series of books which provide details, guidance and advice for people to replicate the experience themselves is, I think, unique in the market place.
On the Everest side things have been slower this week and I still haven’t finished drafting a proposal to Loughborough University School of Sport, Exercise and Health Science. I begin a rowing course this Saturday which will get me properly fit again. I checked the weather report and Saturday weather isn’t forecast to be quite as grim as it has been in the last couple of weeks. All the same, I intend to swathe myself in waterproof layers. I am already imagining freezing cold water trickling down my neck.