Chapter 50
Not a lot of people know this, but Portsmouth has a thriving tech quarter.
Georgie Glazier has just finished a very satisfactory meeting, in a small laboratory near the university, all about the properties of infrared light. She is now at the Greggs in Portsmouth & Southsea Station, enjoying a steak bake.
All in all, she has a very interesting couple of days ahead of her.
Infrared is a technology she has had a particular interest in for well over a week now.
Her interest began when they opened an infrared sauna at the David Lloyd Health Club in Bushey. She read an article about the benefits, so had decided to try it out. Her first attempt was thwarted by a queue of women wrapped in towels.
As any good businessperson will tell you, where there’s a queue, there’s money.
Her next attempt was again thwarted, this time by a queue of women and men wrapped in towels.
The queue was twice as long. Which means twice as much money.
She then decided to book a slot in the infrared sauna, online, only to discover a prohibitive waiting list. If there is even a queue online, then you’re going to need a wheelbarrow to put all your money in.
Georgie has recognized a perfect market for her. Everyone wants the benefits of an infrared sauna, but not everyone can fit in the car park of the David Lloyd Health Centre in Bushey. So handheld infrared therapy is the answer.
Why queue for a sauna when you can plug in a device at home that will give you the exact same benefits as the sauna? Quite what those benefits might be is not something that worries Georgie too much, just that there is a strong belief that those benefits exist.
The handsets she can source from China. In fact, she can use pretty much the same ones she uses for her hand-held sonic massage guns (￡399.
99 or ￡750 for two). She was hoping she could then just screw in some red light bulbs from B&Q, but apparently the whole point of infrared bulbs is that they are hot rather than light. And that makes them expensive.
Georgie hears her train being called. She is excited to see the New Forest. Steve Wheeler is taking her to lunch tomorrow. She has rather bullied him into it, to be honest, but sometimes you have to.
Georgie takes her seat. She will have to change trains in Southampton, then a quick fifteen-minute hop to Brockenhurst.
According to rumours she’d heard, Vern is also in the New Forest now, and Georgie wonders if they will bump into each other. You’d imagine so, wouldn’t you?
And if Vern is there, then might their old pal ‘Jakob Eriksson’ be somewhere nearby? It would certainly be handy to have everyone in the same place.
She discovered in the meeting that if you weren’t worried about wellness per se, but more focused only on a bulb simply being hot, then agricultural livestock suppliers will sell you cheap, incandescent heat-lamp bulbs for around ￡1.
50. So ￡6.50 for the handset manufacture and shipping, ￡1.
50 for the bulbs. Georgie’s ‘Hot Mama – Mobile Infrared Therapy Gun’ is going to sell for ￡199. 99 and cost her just ￡8.
What a boon it would be to have lunch with Steve, find Vern and Jakob Eriksson, and visit an electrical farm supply retailer all on the same trip.
She’s staying in a nice hotel, The Hunter’s Rest. Treating herself.
Georgie wonders, once again, how this has all come to be. In some ways it doesn’t really matter how it has come to be. The fact that it has happened means she really would be a fool not to take advantage of it.