I mustn’t let this all go to my head.

I thought that I was handling all of this new media coverage very well until I found myself sending a very good friend of mine an email with “I am famous!” entered in the subject line. Admittedly, this was on the same day that a feature on me and the NW Office appeared in the Catholic Times, I spent the afternoon answering questions as I was interviewed for the Lancaster Voice and I received a number of emails from colleagues congratulating me on the Catholic Times feature. I suppose one could charitably say that it was natural for me to have got a bit carried away by all of this; my much-lamented late grandmother, however, would instead have pointed her long, bony finger at me and reminded me—very firmly—that this is not about ME. And, as always, she would be right. It is a new, humbler ‘me’ that begins another exciting week as the NW Manager for ACNUK. Who knows what the coming days will bring!

This is not about me...

For this very brief period of time—maybe for the first hour or so of a Monday morning—I can feel as if I have some semblance of control over the week ahead. I have a plan for what I need to accomplish and a rough idea of how I shall allocate my time. From about 10am or so, that generally pretty much goes to pieces. Round about then the phone will ring or an unexpected email arrive or, and this is completely my own fault, I will have one of my ‘ideas.’ Any of these scenarios is likely to knock at least Monday’s schedule for six, and sometimes even the shape of the whole week can change. I’m sure that you know what I mean—this is something that we all experience in our lives (except possibly  for the ‘wacky idea’ scenario; I am starting to notice that other people might not be entirely taken over by strange ‘ideas’ quite so regularly as I am…). Anyway, I am thinking that the key to a really effective working strategy is to find the balance between what you NEED to do and what COMES UP during the course of the day. I suppose that there are various ways that people do this. Some will naturally lean so far to one side or the other (that is, the ‘NEED to do’-ers vs the ‘let’s see what COMES UP’ types), that the desire for balance doesn’t really exist. For most of us, I suspect, a balance is necessary just to get a job done. So, we rigidly stick to the timetables we create in our diaries (and the fear of losing said diary thus haunts our dreams because our working life would shut down irretrievably) or we handle tasks each day in a pre-determined order or we purposely turn off our mobiles and stop checking emails in order to concentrate on a single task for an hour or two. I try to do all of these things (really I do!), but to be honest I just can’t manage without the element of the unexpected. I live for it…in my world every new email or phone call or tweet or knock on the door offers the potential for a new beginning, that tiny spark that sets an exciting fledgling project on its course.

So, my week as it looks right now (at 9:54am on Monday morning):

·        Finalise details for the Joint NW Area Secretaries Meeting on 13 October

·        Source and supply the information requested by the Lancaster Voice as a follow-up to the interview last Friday

·        Finalise details of NW Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom with the various venues, send these to HQ and create an ‘event notification’ for each one on the new Facebook page

·        Speak to all remaining referees for the five new NW Parish Reps who are ready to be entered on to our system

·        Plan the format and content of the appeal talk that I will be giving at St Catherine’s at Penrith in early October

·        Hammer out the last few remaining glitches in my new media platforms (does one ‘hammer’ glitches…? I’m not sure)

·        Meet with the designer to get design specs sorted for PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS; this is the final hurdle and then we are ready to go with this initiative

·        Schedule a few meetings for later this month—with Farid Georges’ team, with Simon Caldwell about the NW press campaign for Religious Freedom and the Prayer Vigils and with a long-time benefactor in the Fylde to whom I promised tea and cake back in July.

Ok: What is written is written. Let’s see just how well my actual working week matches up with the above. There goes the phone…

Thanks for reading!  Caroline