Photos to follow

A woman in Damietta crochets small toys: rabbits, camels, a lion with a woollen mane. For months she has been about to open her online shop.

The toys are ready. The prices are worked out. The page is set up. What she is waiting for is the photographs. A friend with a good camera has promised to take them properly, against a clean background, in daylight, and the friend keeps being busy.

So the shop stays closed, and the toys sit in a box.

Almost every project has one of these. The logo that is still being finished. The price list waiting on a supplier. The page that cannot go up until the wording is right. One missing piece, and everything around it stops, as if the whole thing were a single block that could only move at once.

It rarely is. Most work is a row of separate pieces, and only a few of them truly depend on each other. The rest can go ahead while the gap stays open.

She could take the pictures on her own phone, by the window, and write next to each one that better photos are coming. She could open to her cousins and their friends first, the people who would buy a rabbit from her if it were photographed on the kitchen table. When the proper photographs arrive, she swaps them in. Nobody will mind, and some of the early buyers will not even notice.

The trick is to name the gap honestly and then step around it. Write down what is missing, so it is not forgotten. Then do the next thing that does not need it.

What we are waiting for usually does arrive. It just does not need to arrive first.