Failure??

Good morning!

It's not wet today thankfully, still fresh though and windy! 

We had a good day yesterday, just getting things bottled and labeled in preparation for the manic week ahead. We have to get the Ely stock sorted today and go up in the loft to get the Christmas decorations sorted ready for set up tomorrow morning.

We put out the list of shows that we will be attending between now and the end of November, we will put the December ones out next week, if you are coming to the shows, come and say hello and we look forward to seeing you there. 

I was chatting to Paul earlier and I was saying I am itching to get going now, yes slightly nervous because you have no idea how they will go, but a few nerves is a good thing, if you didn’t have them then you clearly are doing the wrong thing. My aim for this period is to enjoy it as much as possible. This has been a particularly tough year regarding shows for many different reasons, there have been some great ones and then there have been some appalling ones, that is just the way it is. So my aim is to enjoy the fun ones and Christmas ones are most of the time a lot of fun. As long as you are wrapped up warm, that is,  for me it's to make sure my feet don’t get cold, I don’t feel the cold that much, working in this freezing cold shed helps with that but when your feet get cold, that is just miserable. I have an anti fatigue mat which I put on the floor which massively helps, plus it stops your back getting sore. So that is going to be the first thing that goes on the list to take, that and the trolley! I have done plenty of shows where I have to carry the boxes one at a time, yes it warms you up but it's not something you want to be doing on pack up.

If you saw the live yesterday, you would of seen the banter between Gema and I regarding our gins we are making for this year's advent calendar. Each year we develop a new gin each and include it in the calendar, we have both made some good ones and some not so good ones in the past. Gema made her one Friday and wasn’t happy with it. It didn’t turn out as she hoped, so I said bin it (we don’t put it in the bin, it gets redistilled so it is not wasted) and start again. She does what most people would do, feel like she failed and it's a waste etc, this is so not the case. Like anything the only way to learn anything is to have a go, get it wrong, then have another go and repeat until you get it right. When developing a new product/recipe, this is the only way, you can come up with an idea, then you draw on your experience on putting the first version together, taste it, find out what works and what doesn’t and then try again. If it worked out the first time, that's great, albeit a little lucky,but you won’t learn much from it. This pretty much applies to everything, no such thing as a failure, you just keep learning, and as long as you keep having a go you will get there. 

So talking of failures, my first version of my gin is in the still, I have chosen Lemongrass and Thyme, or spring onion and twigs as it looked like yesterday. I will patiently wait until it finishes coming off and then cut it back with water to a bottling strength and have a taste. Will it work, who knows, will it need tweaking, probably, but I won’t know that until later today. 

Right off to a meeting

Catch you later

Ant x