Being Self Employed

Today marks my 142nd day of being self employed. While not an especially significant number, it feels like I’ve now spent long enough away from the throws of real work, to really appreciate how good tasty, tasty freedom actually is. This morning I spent a few hours running errands in the sunshine: taking some things to the tip, visiting the junk shop and the wholesaler and hitting one of Leamington’s many millions of supermarkets for some groceries.

Over the weekend we were at a Doctor Who event and a Blitz party, and we witnessed the Christmas lights come on in town. Individually these would all be a fun weekend, but we managed to squeeze them into 36 hours of mayhem. We then declared Monday a weekend and studiously did nothing useful all day.

The best thing about being self employed is that you are the master of your own timetable. It means that when you decide not to surface until lunchtime you can. Admittedly, it’s not the best possible use of a morning, especially not when you do it for three days in a row, but such a level of commitment to not rising before 12 is only possible when you can keep going until 10pm, should the mood take you.

Thankfully, now that the Wocky is winding down for the winter and we only really have the odd market left to do, there is a lot less work involved than there was in the middle of the summer. It means that I get to stop and enjoy daytime TV occasionally, and no one complains because I should be concentrating on something other than Dale Winton’s tie.

The downside of being self employed is that you never really get away from it. There is a pile of accounts work that needs to be collated and entered into a spreadsheet. We already have enough plans for our month of not-actually-trading in January that we will probably need two or three months to cover everything, and it will be cold. Although there are natural stopping points, there really isn’t ever a point where we are actually done.

Yet looking back on the last 142 days I don’t much fancy plugging myself back into the system any time soon. At this time of year my previous job, working for an online gift company, is all about long, hard days, phones full of angry customers and the fruitless pursuit of getting office secret santa gifts on special delivery to people who probably don’t want them, because tradition dictates as much. There is a mad rush towards getting parcels out of the door at all costs and rushed into a frenzy of postal lorries right up until the last possible moment so that Christmas Day is the first time you stop for breath. And then there’s working between Christmas and New Year, taking returns of unwanted secret santa gifts and the first wave of broken electronics.

It is refreshing to know that all these things are still going on, and that I don’t need to have anything to do with them. The Jabberwocky’s last outing of 2013, at the moment, is the weekend before Christmas. Better than that, we have already started turning down work on Christmas day. There are some things that money really can’t buy, no matter what Bargain Hunt would have us believe.