obtain more balance in my life and work purposefully and not obsessively

because I am BONE TIRED, dreadfully tired, exhausted.

My eyes feel hollow and my head aches. My muscles feel weary and my body simply feels worn out.

I also feel a bit tense and weepy.

I can ONLY work.

Lost without work.

Without work I am an empty shell.

Yet I am TIRED of working.

Void needs filling.

yet I am uncertain how to go about achieving it.

Work seems to be so fully intertwined in my being that I can’t envisage a life with less work.

I feel lost without it.

to be in the audience at the taping of a TV debate show on ‘transformation’.

The magnificent Mamphela Ramphele will be on the panel.

Shhould I take time out on Saturday to attend?

I woke early in my hotel room and have been working on the speech I have to deliver.

Then I shall make my way across London to meet daughter and spend some time with her. She is ‘puppy sitting’.

I will, of course, ask her to critique the speech.

and I still have quite a lot to do.

off!

(Didn’t stop me worrying about work, my business partner, tasks) but I did a lot of walking around the Cape Point N ature reserve and Kirstenbosch botanical gardens.

Now for a hectic week!

I am in the glorious, if egotistical city of Cape Town, wrapped around the mountain and lapped by the Indian AND the Atlantic oceans,surrounded by beaches, followed by endless vineyards in the soft, eroded mountain foothills.

What to do? Spoilt for choice.

DH wants to drive down to Cape Point Nature reserve which is within the city precints, but gloriously wild. I have vetoed a wine farm tour (it’s no fun drinking by yourself – he is a teetotaller, who somehow loves taking me to wine farms and buying wine).

I would like to visit a couple of the arty places CT has to offer, and I have requested a vigorous walk around Kirstenbosch botanical gardens tomorrow – oldest trees there planted by Dutch settlers in the mid17th C, I believe.

We are planning to take in a Shakespearian play at the Baxter theatre tonight.

But for now, it’s probably a meander down to Cape Point. We will stop at Boulders Beach, where there is a colony of resident penguins.

But now for the oh-so-self-aware-and laid-back-city.

but, the upside is as follows:

Next Friday afternoon (after a VERY important 3 days of meetings with government officials from 5 departments) I am flying to Cape Town to spend the weekend there. (DH there n business from Wednesday onwards)

I am planning some artistic pursuits there. Maybe we should include an excursion to a couple of favourite wine farms.

Suggestions called for re good weekend activities …

from one of my businesses’ very first clients, now working for a very very large parastatal social responsibility programme.

A chance to do some real on the ground enterprise development work and skills development.

We could have fallen out with BS because they took a long time to pay. However, we chose to adopt a firm but unyielding approach to payment,neber backing down but never fighting either.

If we do this work now, we would insist on money up front and a monthly retainer.

(Learn from past mistakes.)