**CAVEAT: This is not a blog containing a serious religious debate**

What a title for this week, eh? It came to me when I was clearing up a present that the budgie had left on my shoulder. Minds must be blown by now. I’ve wrote about a very religious symbol and bird poop in the first 40 words this week.

Do you have a vision of me collecting little wooden statues, carved with acute precision, of all the Greek gods? Or have I gone Viking and decided to worship many gods? Or have I simply chosen to round up all ‘Gods of Hollywood’ (absolutely not including the Weinsteins of the world), inspired by watching Thor in the Avengers Movies?

Not those kinds of gods.

Gods of the guru kind.

In Sanskrit, guru means the one who dispels the darkness and takes towards the light.

So, I’m planning to electronically collect business gurus. Those people in my industry who know their stuff inside out and are generous enough to share their knowledge.  I’ve dabbled in who’s who and what their speciality is, but I haven’t made that comprehensive list yet.

I’d like to say that my ‘positive thing’ from lockdown is that I’ve expanded my knowledge. The light might not be that bright for a while, considering how long it takes me to do everything else, but I should be able to come out of it at least shining a little candle.  And hopefully know more about subjects that I’m hazy in at the moment.  In short, be in a position to grow my business more as we burst forth from lockdown in a splendid ray of rainbow – taking one step out the door.  Let’s face it, we will not suddenly be going ‘back to normal’ as we knew it before.

Speaking of collecting, my daughter, on the other hand, is collecting something entirely different from me. If someone had asked me if she collects anything, I would have said soft toys. It started off as a few souvenirs from places, then started to be a souvenir from every place we visited.

Imagine my surprise when someone asked her if she collected anything. I thought, here we go, lots of soft toys to talk about. Then she said ‘feathers’.

News to me. We have craft feathers, but I wouldn’t say I’d bought an abundance of them to hoard like toilet rolls in the beginning of lockdown in case we ran out. She does use them a lot in crafting, but I wouldn’t describe it as an authentic collection.

Intrigued by this ‘second’ collection, I asked if I could see the feathers. Sure, she said. Then proceeded to find her bag full of blue and white feathers of all sorts: tail feathers, wing feathers, but mostly soft and fluffy body feathers.

She’d been collecting the budgie’s feathers as he’s moulted. So, I probably have the equivalent of a quarter of a budgie’s downs in a bag, (budgies are deceptive little birds and can have up to 3,000 feathers on them!). I guess we have the ability to make him an extra coat for the winter in case it’s a bad one this year.

For the record, the budgie likes to collect toys. I wonder if the gurus have any collections?