For all I'm worth

Let's talk a little bit about the economics of making bead earrings.

It does vary a bit, but generally it takes me a little over an hour to make one pair, from when I start to choose the colours up to the point where I drop it into its labelled storage envelope. (I use those wage envelopes; they're the ideal size, and obviously I do need envelopes or something similar so that the earrings don't tangle in storage.) The cost of the materials involved varies, again, according to what type of beads I use; I'd say the hexagons are probably the most expensive to make (those Lipsis aren't cheap). Even so, I'm not using gold-plated beads (believe me, you can get them), so the materials cost is not very significant in proportion to the labour cost. And then there's all the other stuff, like keeping records for accounts, posting stuff out, publicity/marketing, and - of course - keeping up my stock spreadsheet so that I can ensure every pair I make is unique, unless I'm commissioned to do a matching set for a group of bridesmaids or whatever. That takes a lot less time than actually making the earrings, but it still has to be factored in.

So - once you take out all the seller's fees, postage, and other add-ons - I am not taking anything less than £15 for a pair of earrings; and it's going to be a bit more for the wreath style, because those are quite complex and therefore take longer to make. The only exception is if they come out with a slight flaw (only two pairs so far, both the fractal style, which requires a bit more concentration than the others because there isn't that rotational symmetry). If it's something that won't be visible in wear but you're going to notice if you examine them closely, fair enough. I'll knock the price down a bit. But other than that... nope.

And it is actually quite something that I can say that.

I've thought about starting businesses several times in the past; you do, when people (in general) won't employ you. And I have generally worked on the assumption that I need to keep the costs down as low as possible, specifically including the cost of my time. For much of my life I'd have felt very guilty about paying myself as much as the minimum wage, and I'd have been perfectly well prepared to work all the hours God sends (except Sundays) in order to scrape a living. And that didn't in any way mean I had a problem with the concept of a minimum wage. I always thought it was a great thing. For other people, of course.

This is what happens when you have a totally skewed childhood. When I was a child, there were two types of people in the world: there were the Mighty Adults, whose convenience was paramount, and there were children, who were exhaustively unimportant and a terrible nuisance, but who were tolerated because eventually they would grow up and become real people. The definition of a good child was one who never inconvenienced the Mighty Adults, and who, moreover, was a skilled mind-reader, so that they could be around exactly when they were wanted and conveniently disappear when they were not, and so that they could tell when they were supposed to be included in a conversation. (Joining in a conversation where you were deemed to be excluded was naughty. So was failing to join one where you were deemed to be included. This meant that, statistically, you'd get it wrong about half the time.) So, of course, there was no such thing as a good child; the best you could hope for was to be as little nuisance as you could manage to be. I did very badly at that, despite my best efforts. I was told I was a pain and a nuisance pretty much daily. I was also told that I was ugly, clumsy, weird, barmy, extreme (I was never sure exactly what was meant by that), unmusical, and totally lacking in common sense. The only thing that made it bearable was the knowledge that one day I would become a Mighty Adult and then people would have to treat me with at least basic politeness; but, of course, children do tend to believe what they're told, especially when they're told it all the time, because they don't have a standard of comparison. So, basically, I believed I was rubbish. Utter rubbish. And I did not wake up on my eighteenth birthday and think, "yay, I am now a Mighty Adult, so that makes me a real person and I'm no longer inferior to everyone else"; this despite the fact that I now had certain Mighty Adult privileges, like being allowed a mid-morning drink (a child who was thirsty mid-morning would be told it "wasn't time" for a drink yet, so they would have to wait till lunchtime), and being allowed to eat sweets at any time of day rather than having one or two doled out after lunch and tea.

Nope. Sorting out all that mess was a gradual process, and I would not have done it without the Lord's help; even so, it took me till I was sixty to realise that every single one of those negative things that had been thrown at me all the time had been a lie. (Well, apart from "weird"... but even that wasn't true in the sense that it was intended at the time. I'm keeping "weird". Weird is fun!)

And with that has come the realisation that, actually, you know what? Minimum wage is for jobs that anyone can do. What I am doing here is very much not something that just anyone can do; it takes a very high level of dexterity, and it also takes a certain amount of artistic skill. I'm not just making to a formula. I'm not even just picking colours, though I do a lot of that (and there's some skill involved there too). No, I have to design from scratch. This is not like stacking shelves in Sainsbury's. Therefore, it is not unreasonable for me to be able to make a little more than minimum wage for doing it.

I just want to be very clear here: my parents were not in any way malicious. That doesn't justify the way they behaved - no child should ever be brought up the way I was - but I don't want you to go away thinking they were some kind of monsters. They weren't. They both had terrible childhoods themselves (my late father wouldn't even talk about his), and they were also, for various reasons I won't go into here, quite isolated. They didn't have a network of other people whom they could rely on to help, and who were close enough to see and question what they were doing, so they had nobody to correct their mistakes. My parents' house was, essentially, a black box. All anyone outside it saw was three very bright and stunningly well-behaved children, so I imagine they all thought we had excellent parents. Little did they know. And I think that was a lot of what was driving my parents; they were extremely anxious to succeed as parents so that other people wouldn't judge them, and "success" meant producing... very bright and stunningly well-behaved children. By any means possible.

It's quite astonishing how happy and well-adjusted all three of us turned out. That doesn't mean it was easy to get there.