Child Labour
Did you ever have a prospect say they didn’t have the time to do this business. Well I don’t either – not at weekends.
Weekends to me are family time. But then again if the opportunity presnts itself…
Today was a fairly typical Saturday: Tamsin took Theo to the next round of his unstoppable journey to the county cross country championship – which meant I had Hugo to get to his athletics training at the sports centre. Fortunately this is in the same complex as the arts centre where Owen and Lottie were already busy with their drama classes.
The only difficulty was that they all finished at different times. For instance Lottie and I would have to hang around for half an hour before Hugo finished – and then there would be another half an hour before Owen came out of his class.
The plan was that in these “wasted” intervals, I should walk the dog. She was spayed last week and so walks round with a ridiculous cone on her head and isn’t supposed to be off the lead.
So Lottie and I took her for a saunter round the houses. We walked, we chatted, the sun shone and we came to a man walking towards us.
Instinctively I reached into my pocket and gave him a piggy card. Then I looked at the houses and their letter boxes – and asked Lottie if she wanted to post cards. When you’re nine years old this can be quite exciting – and by the time Hugo was ready to finish his athletics, we had dispensed about 20.
Hugo, of course, wanted to put cards through letter boxes too. So I suggested we do it properly: I would get some flyers out of the boot of the car and I would pay this child labour properly (it’s tax deductable).
Lottie, who had been quite happy to do it for nothing, was delighted with the idea of 5p a letterbox. But Hugo instantly started to negotiate. In no time at all he had me up to 10p a flyer. This struck me as fairly steep but I would far rather they earn their pocket money and anyway, I thought it was a good lesson for him to drive a hard bargain and get what he wanted (I know I will regret this when it comes to bedtime)
Anyway, off we went down the road: The dog got her walk, the children earned some money (to buy Christmas presents of course) and I had the satisfaction of seeing 40 flyers being distributed. Add that to the cards Lottie had done for nothing and you have 60 pieces of information that went out into the world today – and all without “going to work”.