Day: March 24, 2015

Beepalaces and book sorting

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

As a diligent reader, you may have remembered that I have been volunteered to run the bookstall at the village festivities in May.

This coincided with the fact that we can no longer send our culled books onto another shop – it has closed.

I am going to forgo the brackets – because I over used them in the last blog – but I will explain.

In order to keep the shelves in an Oxfam bookshop looking fresh and interesting, we cull those that have been around for a while.

Should anyone want to understand this system in detail, let me know and I can provide you with the details…..

Anyway, because we currently have no other shop to send our books to, we have to put them in sacks for re-cycling.

And this came to my attention just as I was volunteered to run the aforementioned bookstall. It doesn’t take Sherlock to work out how this might work.

Yes, indeed, the culled books are currently stacked high in our garage, waiting to be sold to an unsuspecting public in Deepest Sussex and, hopefully, Oxfam and the village will get a 50/50 split on the proceeds.

Stalwarts who have been involved in the bookstall before me, have come to my aid and said they would help, and saying that I might need all the help I could get, and today, a newish friend turned up to sort out what was in the garage.

The sun shined on us and we hefted books and put them in various categories and chatted about this and that.

A successful London businessman, he has ‘retired’ down here and got involved in the most fascinating small business.

He helps a company which is making beepalaces.

Now, I put aside all thoughts of books and their interest when I first heard about beepalaces.

Did you know that most bees do not live in hives? Nor me.

Did you know that there are about 250 types of solitary bee in the UK who don’t make honey or have much of a sting? Nor me

Did you know that an acre of apple orchard needs only 250 solitary bees to pollinate it compared to up to 20,000 honey bees? Nor me.

As I sit here writing this, the sun is setting and very nice it looks too, and by chance, one of those very nice chances, a bee is gently wandering around outside the window looking for something useful to do. I now suspect it is not going home to a hive of thousands of others, but to a solitary bed.

Not least in thanks for the book hefting, and because it is so interesting, we will be buying a solitary beepalace for our garden.

I have to say that our purchases of bird boxes have gone completely unremarked by our bird, but we live in hope.

I also have to say, we have noticed that we don’t have that many bees in the garden but thought it was because bees are in crisis.

Looking at the beepalace website, I think we might have to grow a whole load of new things. Perhaps my newish friend will advise.

http://www.beepalace.com

Decorators

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We had the decorators in Oxfam last week and I could (easily) bore you with how as the only childless volunteer, I went in on Mother’s Day (with the best beloved) to help the ever-patient Oxfam manager get all the books off all the shelves.

I could further (very extensively) bore you with getting them back on the shelves (a much longer and back-breaking business) with a rally of other volunteers on Thursday. (Sorry for all the brackets, but don’t you think ‘rally’ is a good collective noun for volunteers?)

Suffice it to say, that we re-opened on Friday with pretty much all in place, a new table display, a window display and all in all ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

But although the door into the shop had been painted, the door to the upstairs and the one to the back where the books are ‘dumped’ were not, and distinctly shabby they look.

On Monday I was snuffling around the shop (seeing as it is a time for brackets, I will mention this is my third cold in as many months and not welcome) when I saw a man outside looking very intently at the windows and signage.

He came in and introduced himself as the Oxfam building inspector come to check that the ‘works’ had been done.

I said how pleased we were with the newly painted walls and although no customer had walked into the shop saying “ Blimey, what a great re-decoration,” we felt the place looked fresher.

I said that it really didn’t matter that the skirting boards had not been painted, as not many customers were likely to notice those.

But, I said, the doors do look really shabby and let the side down rather. I said (rather disingenuously) that I didn’t know whether the fault lay with the decorators. (I had asked the man still there on Thursday and he had said they were told not to paint the doors.)

I would like to say the man didn’t feel browbeaten, but he did concede defeat and rang the contractors to say, paint the doors, do it when the shop is shut, and do it soon.

Thank you.

(Not much to the outside world but to the small universe that is the Oxfam shop in Petersfield, that means a lot and by the way, despite being only open for two days last week, we took more than £1,000.)

(End of brackets.)