July 31st

Last day of July and the month has ended with a hot streak as far as weather goes, it has been pretty warm for the last 5 or 6 days and at last it feels something like Summer in London. Work has been slow going, not much coming in as far as orders go but at least it has not been totally dead like it was a couple of weeks ago when we were all suddenly scratching around looking for things to do. When the orders slow up time drags and everyone seems to work a little bit below par, the less work there is to do then the worse the performances can be, both individually and collectively. I have noticed that a certain amount of business is needed for people to hit their optimum level; if the hours of the day slowly tick by it gets hard to stay motivated. I for one end up taking a long time to do things which if there were a lot of other tasks that needed doing I would accomplish a whole lot quicker and to a better standard as well.

Today for instance I spent quite a bit of time surfing the Net trying to sort out booking air tickets to go to Spain in September; checking out flight times, comparing prices, etc. All without actually getting to the point of making a booking, just acquiring the information, a lot of which I have already forgotten as I sit here in the early evening and write this. Of course all this keeps me from concentrating on my work but when there is only a little work to do there is little incentive to stop wasting time anyway, you just get distracted, lazy.

The other factor to bear in mind is the heat and the fact that the temerature is high enough in the office to make you feel hot and sticky, unable to move that quickly, both physically and mentally. Like a dull dog panting. So it looks like I have come back to the weather. It affects my sleep as well, not necessarily in an unpleasant way, more in a stuporous kind of way; at night I fall into a sleep which has dreams that I know I won't have a chance to ever remember. I wake up in the night just before dawn and lie there a while before dozing off again. Finally I haul myself out of bed around 6.45 or 7.00 am; it takes a bit of an effort to get going, even after coffee. That is OK though, my mind is dulled maybe, but at least it is not overly agitated, just working it's way through the dog days of Summer.