Day: November 14, 2021

A Day In The Life

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Decent coffee from coffee shop over the road for me, Jim and Ian

One of the shop floor heater is broken so a call to Oxfam Property Services – always an answer machine. 

Go downstairs mention this to Ian who says ‘no I switched it off’ – not at the usual switch but at the heater, with the aid of  walking stick. (Yes it is high up.)

Leave another message cancelling Property Services.

Billiard cues: Ian discovered them, I have had no luck in finding out what they are worth so hand over to Ian who says he will approach local snooker club

Key: So, we needed to get a new key cut because we had to send a shop key to the new Oxfam contractor which will be taking away our unsaleable books and clothes.

(Why they couldn’t get the keys from the old contractor is a question indeed.)

There is a long story about getting that key cut, but suffice it to say with the help of a generously bearded man with two very nice bulldogs, we did, and sent it off.

Meanwhile the old contractor did a collection but left no plastic crates for us to put books in for the next collection – and there were a lot of books.

Call to them who say they haven’t left any because their contract is up at the end of this week. But today is Thursday and we have two collections a week – and the second one is on Friday.

They call back to say they will collect if we leave the books in any plastic crates, boxes, or bags for life. So, we do.

Call Oxfam and ask for more details and find out the new company are coming (surprisingly) during the night to collect. When? 

Are we getting two collections a week? 

Apparently the new company should have been in touch and done a shop visit. They haven’t. 

Call them and am told the area manager for our area, Laura?Lauren? will call me back – she doesn’t. 

Have to call my fellow ‘acting manager’ and tell her about this in case Laura?Lauren calls on Friday. 

If not, will add to Monday’s list which includes – model railway display ( see previous blog); area manager’s leaving coffee; getting her flowers and making sure everyone has signed our certificate of thanks; picking up a volunteer because the buses from her village won’t deliver her in time for the leaving do; messaging a volunteer on universal credit to make sure he comes to the shop first so that one of us can walk over to aforementioned leaving do and make sure he doesn’t have to pay for his coffee; calculating and printing out a briefing on the week’s takings and Christmas lunch, hoovering because we are not open on a Monday etc etc.

Meanwhile, I have bought an open/closed sign for the shop because even though we are not open, we use Monday to re-do the table and window and re-stocking and clearing books donated on Saturday etc and lots of people rattle on the door assuming because there are people in the shop, we are open.

Ask Ian to put it up.

Make more coffee and tea.

Start to put together a box of books to use as front facers. That means books on stands which show the customer their front cover. They sell better than those just showing their spine. Look in any bookshop and you will see front-facers.

We are now using all those books which are in pristine condition and that we have been collecting since August.

Send a text thanking the volunteer who sorted out the Christmas-themed books and DVDs we have also been collecting into cookery, crafts, children’s, paperback fiction etc piles.

Put out front facers – including a very nice copy of Durer’s engravings on art shelves.

When I deliver his next coffee, Ian has replaced it with a Max Ernst book…..

Jim is pricing the large crate we have been amassing, since August, of stocking-filler books. Humour, little books, off-beat books.

They only sell this time of year. But, and it is a big but, they need to all be front-facing to sell and we have no spare space. Will need thinking about.

Jim and I pause so that I can show him the 1777 map we have found (see previous blog.)

We have been sent, as have many shops around the country apparently, three large boxes of Tottenham Hotspur ( a football club in case you were wondering) merchandise.

Mainly for children.

I am wondering just how many young or very young Spurs fans there are in Petersfield…

Sort them into bags because we need those big boxes for books we are sending off ( see above), and price them all.

Find some woolly hats which don’t shout Spurs so budge up some Oxfam Christmas crackers, and price them, and put them out.

Check emails and find out that two boxes of end of season clothes are waiting for us in the Joules shop down the road. 

Need to organise collecting them, but Jim has just left and that will wait until Monday.

Sort some books and find Asterix and the actress – not really saleable in this day and age.

We have used my mother’s old Kenwood mixer – which I used a lot growing up but has been in our cellar for a while – as a prop in the cookery themed window.

Put it for sale on local facebook group and the person who bought it came in to collect it, and tell me her mum will be delighted – and quite a bit more chat – still it boosts Ian’s takings for the morning.

Spend a bit of time working out shift cover – one volunteer has a step-daughter who needs her broken shoulder operating on so the family needs to self-isolate, another has an impending knee operation which will count him out for say six weeks, another has a major operation coming up and we will need to cover for her, as well as making sure she has a nice ‘care package’ from us. 

(On that, as she is a beekeeper I am thinking one of the components should be Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution which is about an aged Sherlock Holmes. It is lovely and not too long and has quite a bit about bees in it. He is a great writer and I would read a shopping list he wrote. So, I nip round to the not-second-hand bookshop and order a copy.)

Another volunteer, David, arrives. ( He has just had a tooth repaired and wanted some distraction from a numb mouth and several days of painkillers.)

He is a cameraman in ‘real life’ so I have asked him whether he will take a photo of our large and valuable map with a wide angled lens and from up a ladder.

Our antiquarian expert volunteer has said he is no expert on this, but the map should be worth say £750.

I am wondering about contacting a local auction house who have waived their charges before, to see if it might do better – you only need two rich people to want something, and with internet bids who knows……

David calls his friend who is interested in old maps who says send a photo to the man he knows in Sothebys and we will get a free valuation.

Arrange to come in next Wednesday ( when I was hoping for a day off) to do the photos.

Back to the green sofa. You may recall I wanted to use my garage-stored green sofa for tableaux.

Idea being that someone has just got up to answer the door, and everything is left as it would be on the sofa.

See a previous blog for more ideas on what we could do.

Anyway, have arranged for it to come to the shop on Sunday thanks to my dog-walking friend whose husband has a vehicle big enough to get it in.

Check notes left by another two volunteers on what they think is the tableaux we should start with.

They go for the throw, a packet of lemsip, a mug, a pair of slippers and a book.

The only book, the only book, it could be is Cold Comfort Farm ( not least as I have read that many, many times when I am feeling under the weather.)

Do we have a copy – of course not!

Nip to the second-hand bookshop and buy one from them. 

Make a list of what I will need from home to make this work – cushions, hot water bottle, my old slippers etc. 

On the way back, I nip into the butcher as we have eight people for lunch tomorrow……….

Track & Typewriters

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For anyone (at all) still with me on this, now for the models railway and typewriter – not a sentence I would have expected to write.

I knew nothing about model railways but an Oxfam instinct made me say yes when someone donating boxes of books said, ‘By the way, do you want some model railway stuff?’

And, I have watched enough (actually more than enough) Antiques Roadshow to know that can be valuable stuff.

It came in four large boxes and an old suitcase, and I went to get my haircut.

‘Don’t suppose you know anyone who knows about model railways?’ I said.

‘Strange you should say that,’ said my hairdresser, ‘ One of my kid’s godfather is a model railway enthusiast.’

So, the lovely model railway enthusiast and ex-real-train-driver came to help and spent an afternoon looking at what we had.

Lots of it is not of much value but will make a lovely display on the table. 

Some of it, we might be able to sell online.

We have track by the plenty – straight and curved; we have signal boxes and signals; we have a suspension bridge; we have old 125 carriages; we have freight wagons; we have christmas trees; we have grass coloured stuff and pink stuff for putting blossom on your model trees….

(And that is more semi colons than I have used in a long time.)

And, I now know considerably more about model railway stuff than I ever thought I would.

I do know quite a bit about typewriters.

When I was a young journalist, shortly after the Boer War, we had never heard of desktop computers.

We had shared or communal typewriters – never quite enough to go round if we were all in newsroom at once.

And indeed, one of the (shared) typewriters was a really old ‘upright’ one which probably explains why I bash the keys of my Mac too hard indeed.

not quite as old as this but a very close cousin

When you were on the day shift you went into the newsroom and grabbed a typewriter and hoped to get a half way decent one.

One of them, I remember, was so well used the ‘e’ had worn out. So, once you had typed your story, you had to go back through it pencilling in all the ‘e’s missing from your deathless prose.

For every story we wrote, we had two sheets of very thin, poor paper and sandwiched inside was a sheet of carbon paper so we had a copy of what we wrote in case the newspaper got sued and needed to prove what we had written.

Some (indeed sometimes, most) of what we wrote ended up on the spike – literally a sharp spike on the news editor’s desk on which he (and it was always a he) impaled stories that were not going to make it into the next day’s paper.

If you wanted to look up some background to a story, you would go to the librarian and ask for the relevant packet.

And it was a cardboard packet of newspaper clippings and sometimes spiked copy which he ( and it always was a he) had thought to save and file under that particular packet heading – it was sometimes (often) a lottery as to what was in any packet and how relevant its contents might be to what you wanted to research.

We would have thanked any god for Google.

So, after the rinse aid and tins of salmon, I was very gratified to find this.

It turns out to be worth £50. ( Thanks to those very same gods for eBay.)

We will put it on the table with books that would (probably) have been written on a typewriter – not a quill, or fountain pen or a laptop.

So, Hemmingway, Enid Blyton, F Scott Fitzgerald, E E Nesbit, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, C S Lewis, Sylvia Plath and any others I can rootle around and find.

The danger of this plan is that the typewriter sells immediately and customers look rather bemused at the random collection of books – but for £50 I am willing to risk that.