Exploring Nottingham
Today is Anna’s first full day of operation of her new, web based, bespoke lingerie shop, shop.redacornfashion.com. She’s worked incredibly hard to build her business on Instagram and now she’s expanded to a professional web presence, which will give her much better insights into her customers browsing and buying habits as well as making it much easier for her to scale her business. She designs and makes all of the products herself and I’m incredibly proud of her achievements, as am I am for all my girls, who are all achieving in their own ways, but this week it’s Anna’s turn for my admiring gaze, albeit a virtual one. I’m particularly impressed by the attitude that she’s adopted, one of constant experimentation, with mistakes all taken in her stride and framed as learning opportunities. She’s also in it for the experience, rather than the money, everything she earns she re-invests in the business (sorry Inland Revenue, no taxes to pay here). All pretty impressive for a 17 year old!
Debbie and I have been busy too, my day of course started at Caffe Nero where I was occupied migrating content from my old professional web site Productive, People, Places And Teams over to this blog, now that I’m retired it no longer makes sense to pay for and maintain two sites, but some of the posts are worth preserving. I still have a lot to migrate so I will probably do 5 a day.
Debbie met me at about 10am and after quickly buying me some trunks’ for my outdoor swim tomorrow, we went to the City Of Caves, which is an actor facilitated tour of the vast underground network of caves underneath Nottingham:
Discover a hidden world beneath your feet underneath the streets of Nottingham. Explore our original and historic site with sandstone caves with our actor led tours and meet our friendly characters Archie and Annie the Archaeologists or wander through at your own pace with our fantastic audio tour. You will be taken on an archaeological journey under the cobbles of some of Nottingham’s most famous streets and up through Drury Hill, which was the main street where the poorest residents of Nottingham once lived in Nottingham’s smelliest slum, Narrow Marsh. Discover how Nottingham dwellers once lived and learn about their journey through the ages. See the caves as they have never been seen before, stripped back to their original historic setting and discover the logic that went into building, shaping and maintaining these fascinating dwellings.
We both really enjoyed it, particularly the tanner’s cave and the actor who described the very messy and time consuming process involved in creating usable leather, at least as it was 400 years ago.
After this time underground it was nice to be back up and exploring the rest of the canal network, taking the left branch and following it to the river Trent and then following the Trent as far as the newly opened tram line, which we walked along back into the centre. Debbie really liked the totem pole sculpture trail that borders the tramline.
I’m heading back to the hotel soon for a nap and then we are off to watch A Man From Uncle at Cineworld IMAX, my favourite cinema. The IMAX was superb and the film fantastic, a perfect blend of comedy and action, like a mix of White Collar and Bond, I can’t wait for more.
After that we had dinner (for me) and supper (for Deb) back at the hotel followed by a couple of episodes of Stargate Atlantis which continues to delight me, tonight’s best episode had Rodney, suffering from concussion, alone and close to death trying to think through life saving scenarios while suffering from delusion and hallucinations (Sam Carter) it was really great.
