First of all I must apologise for using the phrase ‘the eye of the storm’. I wouldn’t have resorted to this if I hadn’t found myself in a metaphor emergency.I was searching my mental archives for a classical phrase, and the one that kept coming to mind was something to do with Scylla and Charibidis (not sure of spelling), but I don’t think that one is entirely appropriate, as it seems to suggest I am being menaced from both sides by something but there is a chance of steering clear, whereas my situation is that I’ve come through one really trying week at work and I know the next one is going to be even worse.
Any suggestions for a suitable metaphor are welcome, by the way! It won’t really help me cope with next week, unless it helps me to laugh at the whole thing.
Bamboo in the sunlight
I have known for some time that next week at work was going to be very busy, but during this past week I began to realise it would be the week from hell when meeting requests started flooding into my email box and I had to keep pointing out to people that they had double-booked the meeting venue or that it was physically impossible for people to be in two places at once. I am not a professional meeting organiser, by the way – more of an innocent bystander. I suppose the underlying problem is that there are just too many meetings, although I suspect that the real issue is that there are too many projects going on at the same time. As a card-carrying introvert (not really – although it might be useful to have a card to show people to explain why you like to leave social events early or indeed not go to them in the first place), I used to be terrified of meetings, but I have been to so many now that I just look on them as an opportunity to study my colleagues’ behaviour with a view to putting them in a book one day.
Anyway, as I sit here in the eye of the storm, with the pale but dazzling February light pouring into the conservatory, this weekend I will once again be working on final edits for my latest mystery novel, which I now have here in printed form. I’ve found some very exciting elephant sticky-notes to mark it up with, I’ve been through the first chapter already, so the path to publication is not only clear, but lit at each side with those solar powered lights that switch themselves on, in my experience, randomly when you least expect it.
McCallum Ogilvy 