My niece was staying so she came to work on the set up of The Garden Show at Loseley.

She was bowled over by the big house but less impressed by what we were doing, ‘Is it like a big car boot sale?’

To be fair she had never seen one of these shows in full flow and indeed didn’t stay long enough to see it in action – but next year….

Anyway, she and I, along with a very nice man, were delegated to put up bunting.

It may not sound like much to you but it is one of those details which have to be done.

She came up with the idea to string the bunting from the central pole and after a while – always one to consider things before jumping in – she got into the swing as it were and I think she enjoyed the day.

As I said, I am the H&S person so have to give very member of staff a briefing.

We have codes for emergencies – fox for a fire, moses for a missing child, and sands for a suspect package.

Anyway, I was in full flow of this briefing with my niece looking rather surprised that all these people were listening to me and that I had even an airy air of authority when I got to the code around a suspect package.

I explained that we were a garden show and if it looked like a bag of delphiniums it was very likely to be just that.

And we would never be high on a terrorist’s list of targets.

‘Pretty niche terrorism,’ someone said.

For reasons I am not entirely clear about, we seem to have had a lot of donations of sets of books into the shop recently.

There are some for whom the trip to Oxfam was the last daylight they ever saw and before you recoil with horror, do you know anyone who is willing to pay money for a set of Reader’s Digest’s abridged novels in leatherette covers? Be honest now. I thought so.

We are a place of many retired naval chaps and so we get a fair amount of their books which currently include three complete sets of Maritime History ( one of which has been taken by my retired naval friend at a knock down price – very knock down as it happens as he forgot his wallet when he came for supper and took them away).

Theoretically they are worth about £70 but in practice, they appear to be unsaleable – but bulky.

Not nearly as bulky though as the near complete set of naval architecture books we have been given.

A near complete set because the very nice naval architect (retired) who donated them, wanted to keep a few of special significance as in, he was a contributor..

And, as any fellow booksellers will know, a near set is a long way from a complete set.

And when I say bulky, each book weighs kilos and there are currently about 10 crates of them littered around the upstairs of the shop.

Again in theory they are worth good money but even offering on them on Oxfam Online at a heftily reduced price, there have been no takers.

Needless to say, we have listed them as buyer collects.

If you know someone for whom many books on naval architecture would be a treasure trove of fascinating information, a priceless read, a delight to savour, then do get in touch quickly because we need the space and the crates.

The other day I put out a complete set of Graham Greene books and just half an hour later a man came and bought some of them.

He had picked out nine and I managed to persuade him into a round ten of them but now, as per above, I have a less than complete set.

Unfortunately no one has bought any of the set of Rudyard Kiplings – all rather small and sweet and bound in real red leather ( even if it is flaking a bit and the loose bits have to be swept off the shelf now and then.)

I was told he as making a comeback as a ‘fashionable’ author but apparently not yet in Petersfield.

Then there are the complete works of Agatha Christie. I knew she had been prolific but not nearly two whole shelves worth of prolific.

Interestingly, the DVDs of Miss Marple played by Margaret Rutherford I put alongside them – squeezed onto the end of the second shelf – have sold much quicker than the books.

And the trouble with having sets of books out, is that we get more of them.

There is a direct link between what we put out on display and what we get donated.

(The other week, we very dangerously short of history books. However, I had carefully collected a box of books on WW1 ready for the Paschendale anniversary and we put them out on the table.

That was before I was away for a week os so – when I came back the history shelves were groaning with stock.)

So, I look forward, with trepidation, to endless boxes of, seemingly endless, complete sets.

Still, it fills the shelves.

Never under-estimate how hard it is to be an event organiser.

You need to be able to see the big picture and the many, many, many tiny details which have to be got right. You need to be unflappable, patient, endlessly charming – quite often to people you don’t like – to be a leader and in the case of the event I work on, deal with the vagaries of the weather.

I would be a hopeless event organiser – high on the list of reasons why not, is my lack of attention to detail  – see previous blog and relucant housewife listing error.

But I do get involved with events run by a woman with all the skills listed above.

For my sins and thanks to that extra glass of wine poured by a good friend some years ago, I agreed to be the Health and Safety person ( I do think you always need capitals for H&S.)

There is something childishly pleasing to me in being a behind the scenes person at an event – and I know it is not Glastonbury, but it is still a sneaky pleasure.

I like wearing a staff wristband, having a radio being able to go into areas where the public are not allowed, knowing many of the exhibitors – and doing a bit of shopping on the side.

The staff team are people who are either related to one another or have been involved for years – and in many cases both of the above.

Ask any new face how come they happen to be working and they will point to their mum, dad, aunt, cousin, son, daughter, brother-in-law, friend, and tell you they were roped in and now they plan on staying.

Quite a few of them have been working on the shows since they started more than 20 years ago.

I am a bit of a johnny-cum-lately with only 7 years under my belt and though I have always felt welcome, have made good friends and the great woman event-supremo is flatteringly nice about my uses – this year I went up a notch in acceptance.

So, there is a patriarchy of security and car parkers.

The patriarch comes from his day job in Leicester and his extended clan gather around him – there were three generations of them this year.

H&S in this context is a bit of a fluid brief and can range from helping to reorganise wind-battered gazebos to crawling along with sticky tape to secure a trip hazard, to assisting the cookery demonstrator, keeping the roadway clear to wait for the arrival of an ambulance for someone with a suspected heart attack, managing queues, sorting out squabbles about pitch size and so on.

I have got to know the patriarch through many shared adventures in H&S – security is a rather fluid brief too – but I think it is fair to say that at the beginning he viewed me with some scepticism suspecting I would be the Daily Mail’s definition of H&S gone mad.

This year he managed to get a quite bad cut on his head – and was off in hospital before I got back from whatever errand I was on. He did his own H&S jokes when he got back – I never would have dared…

Anyway, over the years I have felt that I have earned a little more of his acceptance and that he now finds me a bit more use, rather than ornament or obstruction.

This year at one point, I was garbling something about what we should do about some problem and he put his arm round me and told me to stop gibbering, start that sentence again and then we would get it sorted.

Dear reader, I was so pleased.

My best beloved is currently at Vindolanda digging up tranches and trenches of Roman history.

( If you are not sure, http://www.vindolanda.com )

This is the first time he has been away for two weeks on a stretch since we met, so about 15 years.

Now, I lived without a live-in partner from the age of about 25 until my 40s so it is not as if I am unused to being on my own – and indeed he has spent a lot of time travelling since we have been together – but two weeks solid, after all that time, feels different.

Before I met him, in fact the last time that there was just me and the dog (different dog), I lived in Peckham, worked to earn a living, had a social life which was not based on couples.

So, now, apart from the dog thing, all of the above are different.

I knew that what I should have planned was to go away for at least parts of the fortnight he was away or I would allow the time to be swallowed up with domestic stuff, day to day stuff, Oxfam, dog walking etc etc.

But I didn’t plan, so it has.

Dear reader this is a long list of what I have actually done, so, as usual, feel free to wander off to do something more interesting.

I have purged the pantry – finding stuff that had been there since we moved in and was probably not fit for human consumption.

(Admittedly, I did that before he went but I was getting in the mood.

So, he was lying on the sofa in the sitting room reading his Economist, and my visiting lovely niece was lying on the sofa in the kitchen busy with her phone, and the dog was lying on the niece….

I did make all three of them get up off their sofas, look at the pantry and make admiring noises.

The lovely niece was best at that, BB tried hard, dog was just interested in where the dog treats had been filed.)

I have also thrown out all spices and herbs that had gone past their sell-by date and of course discovered that I had half the world’s supply of cumin and a few more juniper berries than I will ever need short of setting up a gin distillery.

Also, there were spices I bought on some holiday and thought I would use to conjure more interesting food of an evening…

And, yes dear reader, they are now in alphabetical order.

(By the way, on the subject of interesting suppers, my BB is eating ‘good solid fare’ on his dig and, I understand, he is starting to understand that my efforts at an interesting supper are to be rather appreciated. I will of course be reminding him of that thought …)

My cookery books have been purged, my dresser has been purged, and the results are now for sale on the table at Oxfam.

Cookery books are lethal. There are so many that you use for one recipe and never use for anything else.

Then there are those that are stained and splashed and generally well used.

I have one that I have kept since I was a student.

There are also those I have kept to impress other cooks but actually I never use – a lot of Jane Grigson and Yottam Ottolenghi – yes I admit, I don’t cook Yottam because getting the ingredients in Deepest Sussex require you to drive for hundreds of miles and pay a fortune and then have a BB who will say,’ I love the Jerusalem flavours of this.’

But I have kept those books because you never know when another cook will come into your kitchen and you need them to think, ‘Oh, what an impressively and eclectic collection, how interesting this cook must be.’

The other advantage of being just me and the dog is that I can eat my fave food of the moment for days on end.

She and I have been eating Nigel Slater’s cauliflower puree with chives. And we have eaten a lot of it.

She likes vegetables and will say yes to a cauliflower puree night after night. The BB although easy to please and never one to complain, might draw the line after night three – the dog however, is up for it.

I also, in this period, have replaced our kitchen bin. Perfectly serviceable though the old one was, it did have a broken lid and that was broken on the day we moved in. That, dear reader, was seven years ago.

I don’t do a Which search in the best kitchen bin category, I look for a bargain.

So, now we have one with a sensor lid – it was on half price sale. If you waft a hand 10 cm ( more or less exactly), it will open its lid for (more or less exactly 10 seconds) and then after (more or less exactly) it will close.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the BB will find it irritating and the rising lid will knock stuff out of his hand and there will be a lot of swearing. But once the batteries die and we have to open it by hand it will be fine.

Apparently, the batteries in the sensor lid will last quite a long time based on you opening the lid 20 times a day. In the last two hours since I installed it, I would guess I have opened it quite a lot more than that…

And there is an admission.

So, feeling that I really should do something with my time, I decided the dog and I should go on a trip to some ancient history – communing as it were with the BB in the Roman north.

I found Cissbury Ring and thought that would do.

Indeed it would have. My oldest friend said,’ Isn’t that the near Steynning? ‘

‘No,’ I said confidently, with the National Trust directions in my mind I was pretty sure, ‘It is much nearer than that, near Slindon.’

I should have relied on her memory ( which I have had to do since we were 18 as my memory is useless and her’s is very good.)

The dog and I pitched up at Bignor Roman Villa asking for directions to the ‘nearby’ Cissbury Ring.

‘ Well,’ said the nice young woman, ‘It is a bit of a way from here’

‘That’s fine, I said, ‘ The dog and I are up for a walk.’

‘ Mmmm, it is two or three day’s walk to Steynning’ she said.

Maybe I will make it to Cissbury some other time when the BB is away.

There are some books people should just not donate. Not in this day and, thankfully more politically correct, age.

In fact, quite a lot of the time, there are lots of books people should just not donate.

The donor told me she had taken the ‘unsuitable’ ones to the tip. I dread to think what state they were in, given the ones she gave us were quite unsaleable. So…..

But then, as a regular reader will know there are the mysteries which make the endless sacking – and I did four solid hours of it the other day, whilst also ‘tending’ the till and yes I did polish my halo – worthwhile.

Back in February, we had a mystery Russian painting donated and try as I might, I could not find out anything about it and though I liked it and wanted to keep it, I could hardly give Oxfam a few quid to find out that it was the early work of a collectable ( no doubt by an oligarch) master.

But Deepest Sussex harbours more interesting types than you might think and our village produced a lovely man who is a Russian and East European art dealer.

He was very kind but basically told me the picture was a daub and if I liked it, I should hold on to it and wait – one day, you never know, the artist might be discovered….

We have in the shop an Iranian book – large but slim – which is an illustrated version of Rumi’s poetry.

It is not old, in fact published in Teheran in the 1990s, but in a limited edition and I can’t find one for sale anywhere on the internet.

The illustrations are all paintings by well-known Iranian artists – I can find out that much – but that’s all.

So, if anyone knows an Iranian bookseller who knows his/her art and Rumi, do let me know.

As far as I am aware, there isn’t one of those in the village.

And then we had a book donated which was a kind of scrapbook of letters sent to a Mr Percy Wood.

A couple of the letters came from Osborne House and Buckingham Palace and turned out to be from Sir Henry Ponsonby who was Queen Vic’s private secretary.

This got me a bit excited but it turns out on closer examination that most of the letters were a polite declining of some invitation or another.

I found it very hard to track down what Mr Percy Wood was doing to get letters from Sir Henry.

Google was not helping – so he obviously wasn’t much in the news in his day – or any other for that matter.

Eventually, I found out he was a photographer and he went bankrupt in 1879 – so despite at least once taking pictures of Victoria, he is also still waiting to be discovered as an artistic genius.

Working at Oxfam is not always without its dangers and falling over a sack of books the other week, I failed to use my hand quick enough and it was my head that crunched against a wall.

Later I got a rather attractive, I may say, purple slash across my right eyelid and it looked a bit Egyptian and all that was fine but by the time we got to Liverpool for the weekend, it had gone rather brown and ugly.

So, not being one to use make-up in any expert fashion, I went into Debenhams and asked one of the nice make-up ladies to disguise me as someone who had not recently fallen into a wall.

She was great and fixed me up and what is more, she and I railed enjoyably for a while about the appalling mistake that is Brexit.

( My best beloved had been speaking at a conference on the issue so I could chat amiably about the issues around the international arrest warrant and so on…)

Tarted up, by my standards anyway, I went off in search of the Walker Art Gallery – if you ever make it to Liverpool, do go – it is a gem of a gallery and there are some quite posh pictures in it.

Not having been to Liverpool for many years, I was using a map. Every time I stopped to look at it, some friendly local would stop and say, ‘ You looking for the Cavern, love?’

I was caught in the dilemma of not wanting to sound ridiculously pretentious and say,’ Not at all, my good man! I am of course in search of artistic enlightenment not the dive once frequented by a group of popular musicians,’ and actually finding the Walker.

On my way I saw a great advert for the upcoming fashion week:

Infact everyone in Liverpool seemed to be on their best friendly behaviour from the man who made great bacon sarnies, handily just around the corner from our hotel and thus providing a cheap and tasty breakfast, to, well everyone else I met.

As well as bacon sarnies, Liverpool does some great food and we went out of an ( early) evening to look for it ( of course, we had one night with a room service club sandwich in bed watching the telly) –  and marvelled at what we saw.

There was not a young woman to be seen in other than skimpy clothing for what felt to me like a rather chilly weekend – and what they lacked in fabric, they made up for in height.

No one seemed to have less than six inch heels – not just for standing about but for off, away and dancing on what was probably going to be a long night

It reminded me of when I first moved to London many years ago and was staying with a friend in Finsbury Park.

Arriving back late-ish from work one night in winter, I reported to her how the local young women were very hardy given they were standing around on the corner apparently waiting for friends, wearing hardly any clothes.

I’d led a sheltered life….