I am guilty of not having written to so many people that I have decided, instead of sending out a "letter to the friends" as I used to when living in India, to make use of this "cooler" facility, the blog.

Reason for my backlog is the amount of work which has come my way. This is good as it means that my website design company has now taken off. I am glad that I could spend my first few months after leaving Lenovo for experimenting and learning more skills (I also went to evening classes for photoshop, daringly straight into the "advanced" class…).

I have had a lot of moral support for my business adventure not only from Amiten but also from a life coach and from Women into Business, who have been organizing very interesting evening events once a month, a great opportunity to network and to be encouraged seeing how other women had managed to get a business off the ground.

During one of these events I won a prize: 2 months of life coaching. Many of the techniques I learned from Lorna have been so useful that I think everyone should know them. During times when work was kept on hold they helped me to motivate myself to work on long term projects. (More on an "esoteric" level I had an insight: "instead of worrying about if work is coming in or not, just work and work will come" or "work will attract more work." Proof that this can work is that the same day a new job came in. Magic!)

During my summer holidays in the Scottish Borders (where we had the Reiki school years ago) I came across mind mapping in one of the books on Christine's library, a real treasure trove each time we visit her. This is another playful tool to tap into our creative mind.

I know that for private mails I have not followed the rule of "response in 4 hours" as was practice within Lenovo/IBM, but this alertness for business mails has actually brought in a new customer for me. The speed kept its pace and a website was up and running within a fortnight. We have very much enjoyed working together – so much so that the project gets extended by the week: we bounce off each other new ideas, a challenge for the customer as well as for me.

Also completed is a quick and small website for a friend mine, Veena, who is selling very beautiful silver bookmarks which are actually jewels. I have already bought a few for Xmas presents. My aunt in Switzerland already has one and she loves it.

On the side (as a non-profit activity) I am still regularly updating OSHOinUK (which a year ago was 1 page and now… let me count… 89 pages) with the news, profiles and artists blurbs which Veena writes. We also send out a monthly newsletter.

I had tentatively mentioned the possibility to send out the punyajokes newsletter only every fortnight, but this has given such a stir that I could not give it a second thought. Thanks to the software I am using I can now prepare it days in advance so that nobody misses out in case I am away on holidays or on a business trip. But most of the times I have to get up at dawn on a Friday morning to gather the material, code it and send it out for everyone to read it during the day, as a celebration for the incoming weekend! For some people it is a ritual, a weekend cannot start without the jokes, so they told me… If you do not get the jokes you can sign up here (this home page certainly need re-doing!)

In project stage are an e-shop (designed by me but coded by my Edinburgh business partner) and a music website for an internationally acclaimed musician.

I am also re-designing Amiten's website for which we will have a professional photographer come and re-do some of the shots. The re-make is by "order" of a new friend who wants to promote Amiten's work. He is a music director and is very good at bossing people around, but his input has been very easy to follow as it is creative and intelligent. We met him at the newly opened Vienna café around the corner (run by the same people from the Polish shop – Pirogi Ruski…mmmh). Have you seen my picture in a real Viennese café, which Vera took of me when we visited Vienna in December?

I can say that I am now mastering two coding languages (two more are in the pipeline). It is very similar to learning a language (of which I know a few and the brain is used to this kind of gymnastics). It is a bit like "what do I say to get a pint of beer?" only now it is "what is the best way to say that I want to have this picture down here with a red border around it?"

I am glad that I can fall back on the skills I had learned not only as a graphic designer but as a technical manager with advertising agencies and publishers. But the learning is now extending to "how to deal with customers," how to respond to the needs of the clients. And they are different from customer to customer. To this trouble also comes the general reluctance of the Brits to talk about themselves, to put themselves on show (quite the opposite of the Americans who do not know much about privacy). I have found books on accessibility (designing websites for disability) and usability (to make the browsing an easy and enjoyable experience), but haven't found one about how to help customers know what they want out of a website. If you can't point me to one, well then, I will have to write it myself in the nearest future...

And where are you going for your holidays? We had ours, apart from the Borders, also up in the North, exactly where Scotland falls into the water. The landscape reminds me of that at 2000m up in the Alps, maybe on top of the Gotthard Pass, where the glaciers have smoothed the rocks to round boulders, knobs spotted with tufts of short green grass. But in Sutherland these rocks plunge straight into the sea. My poor mind had a hard time to re-wire these associations.



We saw the splendour of the Summer Islands, immaculate beaches where Amiten took some abstract pictures of the rock formations and the Isle of Lewis with its stone circles. I was living in a dream world: imagining to be a Viking approaching the islands in one of their longboats, an extra-terrestrial witness of the volcanic eruptions which have distorted the layers of rock, a stone age man standing in a stone circle feeling that delicate female vibe one perceives around stone circles, a bit like sensing fairies, immerged in an intuitive world where people are still living according to the cycle of the moon). I was on drugs, yes, co-codeine to ease the pain in my legs (the phlebitis is now calming down thanks to my regular walks in Kelvingrove Park). Did I say there were no clouds in sight for days? And this was during the first week of heavy floods down South.

 

On the family horizon: I have now four nephews. You might have heard me bragging about the one who is a composer, well, he has now terminated his sabbatical in Paris and his first big piece. He is returning to teaching music at the Columbia University in New York and work on his PhD. (How proud I am to write all this! )

But there is now a forth one: He was born at the beginning of this month. I knew he was due that week, but one morning I could not resist from enquiring and called my little stepsister, but could not reach anyone. It was the very morning he was born. It was a blissful experience, even at this distance. I have now changed the picture on my desktop which was showing the morning mist on lake Lugano, where he was born, with this one you see here.



I am reminded of Sadie who was making such a fuss about her grandchild, "how beautiful he is, etc.", but now I am doing exactly the same. Isn't he cute? His name is Edoardo Max Vanossi (Jivan Kavyo thinks it would be a perfect name for a Latin American president!).

This is about it. Might be a good idea to keep writing small passages more often. So come and visit. I might even add a joke as a present from time to time.

Take care – Love from Punya