The Faith Cake Phenomenon Strike Two...

dear sir who-has-entered-the-emporium-bearing-a-highly-suspect-looking-tupperware-box-and-a-glazed-expression, i will be not be buying one of your cakes for the following reasons:

Reason Number One. as i explained to your esteemed colleague some weeks ago (* see The Faith Cake Phenomenon below) you find yourself stood in a building which among other paraphernalia of wonder and delight houses a tearoom. if there is one thing we have to hand, it's cake. Now usually this would probably not affect your chances too much, i have a famously low threshold for general sofheadedtness. i would give money to a man in an orange jumpsuit with the words "don't give me money i'm a total con man" tattooed on his face. but then there are reasons number two and three.

Reason Number Two. you give a distinct impression of one who cherishes a belief that washing is for Special Occasions Only. That is entirely your prerogative and i will support your freedom, from a distance, to the bitter end. however the problem lies in that I have no way of knowing if you look upon the baking of cakes for sale as A Special Occasion.

Reason Number Three. when asked what charity you were raising money for you answered with the following; "...a er...a spiritual kind of a place...where you go...it's run by a Lovely Lady" now whoa there sir. whoa right there. i feel you should know, that being Lovely (and i could tell by your conviction that the lady was, undoubtedly, Very Lovely Indeed) does not entitle you to charitable status. maybe it should, maybe there just aren't enough Lovely Ladies in the world, Loveliness should of course be encouraged, i'm as Pro Lovely as the next person. all i would suggest is that we, as a species, have some other stuff to sort out first. i would just say that on our List Of Things To Fix 'not enough Lovely Ladies' is probably not in the priority top ten. maybe the top fifty.
and sir, dear pungent and chemically befuddled sir, don't even get me started on '...a er...a spiritual kind of a place'. because i KNOW you're just talking about incense here. and the need for incense would be entirely eradicated if you would maybe just reconsider your stance on Reason Number Two...

now in the words of holly golightly, a Lovely Lady if ever there was one, it should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. i'll give you two.



happy new year people. x

so i would like to tell you a story that i shall call 'The Faith Cake Phenomenon'

and it goes like this...

once upon a time this morning, a lady came in with a box of cakes and we had this conversation right here (with some editing of sentence structure and bad grammar and made up words and huffing on my part):

lady: would you like to buy a cake for charity?

me: what charity is it for please?

lady: (mumbles a collection of initials that sounded like 'Piffles'. and then looks at me as if 'Piffles' pretty much explains absolutely everything that has ever needed explaining.)

me: (ever so patiently because i am ever so patient) and what does your charity raise money for?

lady: Faith.

me: well sorry, it's just my preference, but i only give money to secular charities.

lady: oh we are not a charity specific to any particular religion, we just encourage Faith in general.

me: Faith in what?

lady: anything. (looks at me with a gaze like a very clear puddle)

me: anything at all? ...(trying to be helpful) are you sure?

lady: yes anything. just Faith in general.

me: what like Faith In Yourself? or Faith In Democracy or Faith in The Existence Of Fairies?

lady: (getting a bit frustrated now) YES faith in anything, even atheists have faith in things.

me: (curious) like?

lady:like for example...faith in the fact that you are going to buy a cake today! (looks very pleased with herself for this dazzling piece of genius)

me: that's a little bit vague...i mean that's really quite a conceptual idea for a charity...i mean really, you may as well have a charity that raises money for 'Pathos' or 'Gladness' or 'Ennui'.

(at this point we stare at each other for quite some time.)

lady: Faith is important. Everyone needs Faith in something.

me: hmmmmm well it kind of depends. surely? not all faith can be good. for example Faith in The Effectiveness Of Poking People With a Big Stick wouldn't be the BEST kind of faith would it?

lady: (smiling) are you sure you wouldn't like to buy a cake?

me: (not sure as to whether i am still awake but very sure that i would like this conversation to be over and very much wishing i had a big stick) thank you but NO. i have quite a lot of cake as you can see... (pointing at the cake counter, full of cake, that stands between us like a barrier made of pure irony)

lady: (smiling harder) well you have a lovely day anyway!

me: you too!

and we both lived happily ever after (one of us slightly happier and more unburdened by rationality than the other.)

okey dokey we got some things we need to talk to you about so listen up...

the first thing we need to talk about is a certain kazillion bazillion dollar corporation known as facebook  (in the temporary measure emporium it is customary to accompany all use of the word  facebook  with a shudder and an expression of mild horror

(we reserve our expressions of extreme horror for the times when people come in to the tearoom and ask for diet coke) so we would greatly appreciate it, if every time the word facebook  appears in this text, you wouldn't mind shuddering and expressing mild horror too. that would be super. even if you don't mind facebook . even if you love it, just do it for us, because we asked you nicely.  so the reasons why we are not their biggest fans include the following:

number one. 

they heavily endorse the concept of actually counting your friends.

here at the emporium we endorse the humble opinion that if you can count on the fingers of one hand some people you've been lucky enough to meet, that make you feel at least semi functional then yay for that. friends are not nectar points, or casino chips, it is surely not compulsory to pile 'em high. unless you really want to and it makes you super happy of course, in which case...carry on.

number two. 

they encourage a level of sharing among human beings that is frankly bewildering.

number four.  

we don't mean to sound all conspiracy theory but we hear on the anarchists grapevine (yes they have a grapevine) that they have weird links and sell terrifying amounts of information. but then so do google and every other major internet player. true. but they don't do it under such a smiley social arena while encouraging you to count your friends at the same time. 

number five. 

facebook  talks too much. it can easily be said that twitter is a forum for over sharing just as much as facebook  but twitter itself is reassuringly inanimate. (although give it time and they'll find a way of monkeying around with it) it presents the information and you can choose to read it or not read it- it lays it out for you to play it out. whereas facebook  is like an overbearing parent constantly suggesting new ways for you to make chums, and reminding you that someone you went to a dance class with in kindergarten is having their birthday today. if all the oh-no-machines-are-taking-over-the-world movies have taught us anything, it should be to prefer our technology less opinionated.

number six.

they are so damn pushy. and this is where it gets tricky for us. 

because...they set up a page for temporary measure that we neither asked them to or gave them permission to do, and they did this because people were tagging themselves in the shop (which was very nice of them and i'm grateful they liked us enough to think of doing that). and so there was a page on facebook  that was out there for anyone to claim. and so we had no choice but to claim it. and i don't really like that. choice is an important thing. even when you're a business and you obviously want as many people to hear about you as possible, there should still be a choice. just because you happen to be an gi-flipping-normous kazillion bazillion dollar corporation doesn't mean you should be cheeky.     

so...we now have a facebook  page. (don't forget the shudder) and like everything we do we're going to try and do it to the best of our ability and make it interesting and worth looking at. we're not really sure yet of how it all functions and the best way to go about it all - it took us long enough to work out blogger and twitter! and any suggestions would be gratefully received.

it's right here if you would like to have a look at it..

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Temporary-measure/236004573184711

as always we really appreciate your support - without exceptionally marvellous people taking an interest in us we wouldn't be able to carry on making a strange living out of making stuff up, and we might have to go out and get proper jobs where we wouldn't be allowed to buy as many teapots. so thanks.

and now as an apology for getting all HEAVY here's some of our new fabric that we made. it's got beetle bugs and flowers on, which is about as un-heavy as it gets.

you absolutely have to have the colours in the right order...

say if there was a job going that involved putting All Colours Everywhere in the right order, then i would like that job. it would have to be freelance obviously. and i would like a fancy job title. but other than that i'm pretty flexible, in fact i would probably do it for free. just for the glory.

as a kind of audition for this highly technical and important universal placement, i have made a start in our shop with all the beautiful new yarns that have just arrived. like this... 

i know. that's some pretty snazzy colour sorting going on there, i think we can all agree. if you have any links with The Powers That Be, feel free to pass on my details...  

and if you really must get married...

this here...

is our new wedding stationery display. and it serves exactly two purposes; one: it is very pretty and two: it shows our customers the kind of stationery we do in a way that doesn't just involve me making my very best 'OH THE HORROR' face when they mention glitter. or hearts. or shiny ribbon.
we have recently been taking on lots more wedding commissions, mainly because our Beautiful new printer is so very capable of printing all kinds of exciting shiz, like tags and place cards and cd covers (cd covers!) but also because ( whispers very quietly in a sheepish manner) i am getting better at talking to people who are getting married. ridiculous yes, but true. 
i'm just not a big fan of the old Formal Occasion. if you can't go to something in wellies or flip flops then i have a great deal of trouble attending at all without a paper bag to control the hyperventilating. it's not that i object to dressing up as an activity in general( but maybe say, just do it on an tuesday to cheer yourself up or because your jeans are in the wash) but i really prefer not having to do it on demand. my lovely big sister once made the mistake of making me be a bridesmaid ( i just juddered writing the word 'bridesmaid' that's how bad it is.) and i thought i did a pretty good job of smiling through it like a great big wedding faker, but i was foiled by the unfortunate fact that i have a face like a bill board. (oh i would pay much, much money for one of those calm, mysterious visages that you tend to find on icy blond women, instead of being a cartoon animation!) so as shameful as it is, all my sister's wedding photographs feature a scowling angst-ridden-rebel-without-a-cause. in a very pretty dress. 
don't get me wrong i am no cynic, i am the head cheerleader for Team Love, shaking my pom poms with all the pep available to someone born outside of the usa. but when it comes to Team Formal Occasion (particularly one that requires rehearsals!) i am likely to be found standing on my chair chanting something unpleasant. possibly swearing.
SO i may not be the world's biggest wedding fan, and my excessively expressive cartoon face means i may not be able to gush convincingly when customers talk about their plans for floral center pieces and matching fasinators. BUT what i can get excited about is stationery, yes indeed the temporary measure emporium is PRO STATIONERY. if it can be written about in a whimsical fashion and printed on card then we are fully on board.  

a list of things that happened last night in the hour before closing time:

i took part in a heated debate about turkish ebay, 
i helped perform the first minor surgery that has ever been carried out in the workshop which involved the removal of a ladies nose ring from her nose cartilage where it had become stuck.(i helped from a distance with my eyes closed. i mainly shouted encouragement and boiled water)
i endured a conversation with a grown man on the properties of antique leather buttons, including but not confined to the quality of their fastening loops.
i served and chatted to for the second time that day, the old lady who i care about greatly, but who stretches the limits of my cordiality by coming in the shop TWICE A DAY EVERY DAY requiring undivided attention and access to close personal space, regardless of workloads, other customers, fire and/or flooding. 
i made hot chocolate with cream for the lovely little girl whose mum was upstairs performing surgery on her own nose, and we talked about dog towels,
i removed all our christmas displays,
i stretched replacement stock canvases,
i designed some new big bear bunting (see print layout below)
i locked the doors and flipped the signs and gave myself a stern lecture on the merits of online businesses run from home.

   

want to hear the story about the man who tried to take his pants off in the shop?

who doesn't like to hear a story about a man trying to take his pants off in a public place? no one i know. 


once upon a time in the temporary measure emporium on a tuesday, it being a quiet day out of season, @sycamoresykes was minding the shop by himself. and seeing as though it was near the end of the day and the only customers were an actress from the theatre and her mum, who were sat having a cup of tea, he decided to go upstairs to the workshop for a moment to 'make some frames' (go on the internet). he was disturbed from his 'frame making' by the dulcet tones of two well spoken ladies of southern origin shouting "sir! sir!" 
now this being the first time in his life that @sycamoresykes had ever been addressed as sir he speedily went to investigate. he was greeted by the sight of a middle aged man in walking attire in the process of pulling his pants down. the actress from the theatre being the lovely, well bred girl that she is and barely containing a high level state of panic was suggesting to the man that "if he needed the lavatory, it was just around the corner!" and this is the point where our hero steps in. with no thought for his personal safety or the innocence of his young eyes @sycamoresykes approached the scene demanding to know what possible reason this man had for taking his pants off in kewick's one and only temporary measure emporium. which is a fair question by anyone's standards.
the explanation provided by the potential trouser dropper was that he wasn't in fact looking for a cheap thrill but simply Needed A New Button...what a Plank.
now in the emporium these are the only kind of buttons we sell: 

pretty pretty, shiny shiny, antique ones with little to no practical purpose whatsoever, that's the kind we like. what this man required was something far more practical and preferably with a padlock. and so our hero sent him speedily on his way to the knitting shop two doors down with the following advice,
" go to the knitting shop two doors down but MAKE SURE YOU EXPLAIN TO JUNE THAT YOU NEED A BUTTON BEFORE YOU TAKE YOUR PANTS OFF!" which is good advice by anyone's standards. 


(just in case anyone is worried about june, she was fine we checked on her later...as well as being a knitter with the stature of a small child she is also a champion archer and an all round Badass. and she sold that plank a button.)  

this is how you send bears in the post...

Oh my word it has been a tense few weeks...they should have been here two weeks ago and then last tuesday, and then they were due on saturday, and then thanks to the anti-cumbrian policy of a certain courier company for whom cumbria does not exit at the weekend, they finally arrived on monday...they are now here. bear books are in the building. i can stop dreaming about them in a frantic and un healthy manner (in the last dream they arrived as self-help pamphlets full of informative hints from the nineteen fifties.) and what follows here is a day in the life style picture diary of the temporary measure team's valiant efforts to make up for the delay and get those books in the post and out to all the lovely people who pre-ordered copies. (if you printed the pictures off and flicked through them in a flick book fashion it would be like watching a strange documentary.) 


and it goes a little something like this...    

our coffee whisperer @sycamoresykes did not like posing for this picture, he is not a fan of heavy lifting. he a fan of making beautiful cappuccinos. which is why he is in the photo, my dad was unloading so fast the camera couldn't catch him...

this is me doing my Very Best Handwriting signing copies. note the disordered and mildly hazardous work space. this is why elvis has been trained not to let anyone upstairs...

this is 'the boss' at work, she also answers to 'queen of all things everywhere' or 'captain jayneway'. note the ordered worktop and precision piling. she brings order to chaos. we would be lost in space without her. my mum.

you have to sneak up on @sycamoresykes to get a picture of him. like all bearded primitives he believes photographs steal your soul...

(check out my pumpkin, spooky yes? a poll of customers concluded that it was not spooky, but was in fact a 'happy' pumpkin. what do they know. the standard of customers that day was poor.)

we took all our parcels to the post office in black bin bags. we looked like naughty santas. apologies to georgette taylor for showing her address...only send her nice things please.

and so they are on their way...if one lands on your doormat in the next day or so let us know what you think! 

i didn't mean to send the internet to coventry but i accidentally did...

is sending someone to coventry a liverpool thing? at my school if you really fell out with someone and you didn't want to speak to them then you said "i'm sending you to coventry" 

which is a very, very ridiculous thing for one small child to metaphorically send another small child to a different part of the country in order to express annoyance, but like shell suits and thundercats it made perfect sense at the time. it does make you wonder why coventry though? when they stop speaking to you in coventry do they send you to liverpool? the world is indeed full of mystery...
before i tell you something actually relevant bear with me while i just tell you this, that i was once sent to coventry by the whole school(...it was a small school). and it was because we were all having mushroom soup for lunch (it was a small school and an evil one) and i really HATE mushrooms. so i sensibly decided to use my childish wiles in order to remedy the awful situation by somehow managing to swindle a teacher, (the teachers were having tomato soup- oh it was an evil school) into swapping with me. i returned to my table feeling very proud of myself expecting the congratulations of my peers, who promptly sent me to coventry, including my own sister. human nature lesson number one, don't be a smug tomato soup bearing twat.
my point being and i do like to have a point sometimes, is that i apologize for our extremely rude internet silence. it has been for the very simple and unspectacular reason that is 'keswick in august'. keswick likes to make up for its antisocial winter behaviour by crowding all its socializing into one month during the summer. it is an endearing disagreeableness that they refer to around here as being 'seasonal'. 
our little temporary measure team is always a bit stretched at this time of year and we remember days off in the style of russian peasants remembering potatoes " do you remember that time when you had that day off...do you remember it? it was good wasn't it, that day off you had..."
we do have news though, starting with the most important first...
Elvis Shop Dog has been stripped.

oh yes the sprinkling of dog hair over unsuspecting customers is no more. elvis likes to spend his time in one of two bipolar versions of himself - the oh i am just so cute and sad and in need of your attention and you really must take a picture of me - version of himself spends his time on the balcony, attracting attention by various methods including sticking his head and/or legs through the bars in a variety of striking poses, persuasive whining, and subliminal messaging.

the second version is the Rabid Hell Hound that greets you if you happen to venture too far up the stairs, having boldly ignored the well meaning warning signs and the presence of a safety gate. he likes to be adored from afar. he does not like people who have the audacity to try and meet him in person, particularly large men in hats but also old ladies. and babies. 

what can i say, he is a prima donna. but now he is a neat and tidy prima donna who has had all his hair pulled out by an intimidatingly firm, farm dwelling cumbrian lady. he no longer leaves a trail behind him. and most importantly, in the greetings card department of the temporary measure emporium, people will no longer have to look up in the middle of a tricky greeting card decision, in order to wonder...what is that falling softly onto my head?..it feels like someone sprinkling hair...but who would sprinkle hair? and then look up to discover elvis, blinking slowly at them giving them the full on version one, and before they know it they are reaching for their cameras...suckers!  

and in other not quite so monumental news...bear books are At The Printers Now! three weeks is the delivery schedule and it is too scary. i am currently experiencing The Fear that goes by the name of 'Leaving Other People In Charge Of Important Stuff' what if they accidentally print it in shades of grey or in an early nineties pop art style? what if they remove all the vowels? what if they print the cover inside out? oh The Fear. three weeks is pretty soon though and after all the faffing and fiddling and ocd style tinkering it's about bloody time. so here is the official cover!

and finally as a way of apologizing for being a rubbish blogger and sending the internet to coventry, here is sunday evening over bass lake as a present just for you... 

  

the time when i answered all the big questions...

this here... http://dowhatyouloveforlife.com/blog/2011/06/02/do-what-you-love-interview-emma-smalley/ is a link to an interview i did for the lovely lady who runs dowhatyouloveforlife.com an organisation which encourages people to, yes indeed...do what they love for life. i think you will find that during the interview i manage to answer all the most important questions that have ever been asked while at the same time unravelling the delicate complexities of the human condition. in the process of doing this i just hope i don't sound like too much of a twonk. i hope you like it. 
this blog needs a picture so here is the picture of me and the shop that we used for the interview, in which i am distracted by a passing cyclist shouting "wow what a beautiful lady!" that last part may or may not be true... 

bears are trickier than rabbits...

so it has been a long time coming that is for certain. and the main reason for this is because of a little something that we have come to learn, and it's something that many other people have also come to learn, some in a particularly hard way involving wilderness and tents and growls in the night, and the thing that we have learned is this...

bears are trickier than rabbits...

it's true, remember it. it might come in useful one day. 
and so having learnt this valuable lesson together we now have something exciting to show you...bear book previews!!!!!!! yes we are nearly there and in celebration of our nearly thereness we thought we should show you some sneaky previews. so here they are and incase you needed to know, the last time we met the bear he was being woken up by one self assured and delightful rabbit in,

'once upon a time when i was a rabbit
and there was nothing i couldn't do...'

in our new story,

'once upon a time when i was the biggest big bear
in the whole of the wide world...'

it turns out that our big bear is quite the wonderer, so before each of the following pages you have to read out a line that goes like this...

and then sometimes i would wake and stretch and wonder if maybe just maybe...

and then sometimes i would wake and stretch and wonder if maybe just maybe...
 
and then sometimes i would wake and stretch and wonder if maybe just maybe...

and then sometimes i would wake and stretch and wonder

my most important wondering of all,

if maybe, just maybe, there was something bigger out there

in the wide world than the biggest big bear...

and that's your lot! if you would like to see any more you know the drill, it will be available on our website and in the shop as soon as we have it printed up and ready to go , which hopefully, despite the trickiness of bears and in particular biggest big bears, will be very soon indeed... 



  

and so there is a gentleman...

and so there is a gentleman called bob bryden and he is keswick's town crier and he is without a doubt the greatest town crier that any town has ever had. this is a fact. he has the best costume and the loudest voice, and he is also lovely, although he does tell terrible jokes. sorry bob they are mainly terrible. we are lucky enough to be his favourite place for a sit down and a coffee, even though elvis barks at him because he has the audacity to wear a cycle helmet. yesterday he came in because he needed a coffee and he needed five minutes peace, and he decided to use his five minutes peace to write us a poem, and this is his poem...

thanks bob x
i think there should be a revival of poetry where each line starts from the letters of a word, it would need a catchier name than that but still. i just don't understand why there isn't more of it about, it is quite obviously genius...  

sing along with me if you will...

sing along with me if you will...

(for your singalong information this is the bruce springsteen version and we are all wearing cowboy boots and santa hats.)
“you better not shout, you better not cry,
you better not pout, i’m telling you why,
santa claus is coming to town!”
which is a very good reason not to shout, cry or indeed pout. another good reason is that temporary measure have a brand spankingly new website www.temporarymeasure.co.uk is even lovlier than ever! and three times more exciting for the following reasons:
reason one it has a lovely virtual shop that you can scroll along and mess around with featuring all the best bits of the real shop (including rabbits, canvases, sofas, china teacups, the shiny coffee machine, music from our very own sycamore sykes and resident shop dog elvis) without the inconvenience of putting up with emma’s interesting waitress skills and the whiny noise that elvis makes when nobody is looking at him.
reason two it is now actually useful as well as being
extraordinarily pretty because it has a shopping basket system and a payment system (on the way!) as all sensible and self respecting websites should.
reason three it has all our delightful new things on including ‘once upon a time when i was a rabbit’ letter writing sets, beautiful new ceramics made in cumbria by caroline nash, our organic cotton baby range with t-shirts, sleepsuits and bibs, the truly festive as can be range of cards, decorations, canvases and shoppers and the best christmas present of all time ever...the temporary measure rabbit kit including absolutely everything you need to make your very own cashmerino rabbit! we also have new patterns for our slouchy berets or if you prefer your presents already made and why wouldn’t you, our whole knitwear range is now online...(well that may be a slight exaggeration i am working on it as we speak! so bear with me and my new technical website know how and i will have it all on there in a jiffy!)
so there my good people i think you will find, are your reasons. let there be no more shouting, crying or pouting from here on in! and if you are heading our way over the snow laden season of good will you will be excited to discover that in the spirit of technological advancement we now have radiators in the shop! if however you are stuck in a snow drift but happen to have access to the internet you can follow the gallery life and tearoom times of temporary measure on twitter http://twitter.com/#%21/onlyeverjusta and in the meantime most importantly of all have yourself a merry little christmas... (judy garland version of course) 

and so...

and so i was wondering if anyone wanted to make me a cup of tea?