101 Uses for a Dead Credit Card Number 8: Bookmark

My friends and colleagues are always asking me the same question: ‘How do you do it Charlotte?’

What everyone wants to know is: how do I manage to create such a wealth of interesting and informative content for the ‘My World of Plastic’ blog, whilst at the same time holding down a job at ProSwift, being a stalwart pillar of society in the village, not to mention looking after a large and demanding household comprising of BH, two demanding adult children (is that a contradiction in terms?) and however many of their friends and acquaintances are in the locality of Much Twittering at any given time?

How do I do it? I’ll let you into a secret.  The way I manage to be so productive and creative is entirely dependent on one key skill: the ability to multi-task effectively.

For example, so far this week I have:-

• Read two books from cover to cover
• Researched, written and published 2 postings for the blog
• Painted the garden shed
• Written a couple of magazine articles
• Spread an entire cartload of manure over the rose beds at Lower Billing Grange
• Designed the scenery for the Much Twittering Amateur Operatic Society’s Spring production of ‘Reservoir Dogs’
• Completed the 2011 census on behalf of the Lower Billing Grange household

Among all this activity, I count keeping up-to-date with my reading the most important, and I always have at least a couple of books on the go.

Most recently I have been reading ‘Tulip Fever’ by Deborah Moggach (research for my recent mini-break in Amsterdam) and ‘Started Early, took My Dog’, the latest offering by one of my favourite authors, Kate Atkinson, which had the added attraction of being largely set in my home town of Leeds.

An important aspect of managing a large reading list is to ensure always having a book to hand, so any spare minutes which might otherwise be wasted (sitting on a train, waiting for the gas meter reader to call, lying awake at night worrying about a strange and unexplained pain in the neck) can be usefully and educationally deployed.

To get to the matter in hand, reading all this stuff means I get through a heck of a lot of bookmarks.  Cutting right to the chase, we arrive at use number 8 for the Used Credit Card: bookmark.  Not entirely ideal for the purpose, as they are a bit on the small and slippery side, but better than losing your place and reading the same chapter time after time, and, above all, free.

My favourite authors? Thomas Hardy, Daphne du Maurier, Kate Atkinson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, David Sidaris and Rose Tremain spring immediately to mind, but there are many others, too numerous to be mentioned, waiting to be read and enjoyed.