I do realise that you, dear reader, may wince at the mention of Christmas but for those of us beavering away at the retail of second-hand books, things need to be started on that front.

For some years, I have been telling you about how we start stockpiling books in exceptionally good condition to boost our Christmas trade and that means lots of crates around the upstairs room with notes on them saying they need to be left well alone until I decide we need to start putting them out.

Well, last week, another volunteer and I decided we needed to clear some space to slot empty, waiting crates into.

The shop manager is nothing if not a man to throw anything away or deal with anything today when several months hence might do just as well.

(I have this feeling that if you dig hard enough under bottom shelves, behind boxes, at the back of etc etc you could easily find a mummified body of an apparently unmissed volunteer.)

However, what we found most of during this clear out, was lots and lots of mobile phones. 

People can, and apparently do often, donate old mobile phones and Oxfam has some system of getting them re-used or their innards taken out, or whatever.

But to do that they need to be sent somewhere. Only the manager knows where, and he had clearly decided that there was no rush. 

There were about three carrier bags and a sizeable box of them.

So, we pulled them out of their dark corner – where there was also a hoover which to the best of my knowledge has not be employed for the past say two or three years, a 1960s box for carrying records which had been stashed with out of date cameras and lenses…..

Anyway, we put the phones into crates and put them in the other room, not too far from the kettle, so they couldn’t be ignored.

Next time I went in, the manager had put them all into cardboard boxes, neatly labelled as mobile phones for re-cycling and put them back where they were before!

And they will probably be there next Christmas.

In that clear out/up, I also found a box of Coalport houses – I had checked them and priced them and put them back in the box and promptly forgotten about them – though I do remember thinking they would work on a Christmas table, so all is not lost.

This time of year also means the annual ritual of crab apple jelly.

I am sure I have said before that what was once a nod towards earth mother meets Sussex housewife, lost much of its charm on the basis it is a faff to make and we don’t eat it/remember to give it away over the year, and so is now in a stash in the cellar.

Anyway, this year we have, for the first time, a quince harvest and if anything quince jelly is even more of a faff, but it has the advantages novelty and you can make membrillo from the left over pulp.

 

So, I put a notice in the village shop window offering our crab apples to any takers and this afternoon, as I sit writing this, a family are doing their best to clear the tree and are raking up the windfalls in the process.

Excellent.