Author: aspinalllucy

Bossy, moi?

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I have rather exerted my influence over proceedings at the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield – this will come as no surprise to people who know me.

This week, there have been several reminders of how that works.

Our manager was due holiday and that means we have to get extra cover and I was charming, as I thought, a fellow volunteer to do an extra shift when she said, but much more nicely, ‘OK just tell me what you want me to do.’

Then on Thursday, sweeping down to the shop from upstairs book-sorting, I saw that the display of Valentines cards were still there.

‘Let’s get rid of those, ‘ I said, and so swept them into the back room and replaced them with Comic Relief wristbands. ( I was busy sweeping as you can see.)

It was only a couple of days later the manager managed to retrieve them – they were Mothers’ Day cards.

We have a Syrian refugee volunteer and my best beloved can speak some Arabic so they come into the shop together on a Wednesday which is a day I am not normally in the shop – phew, say the Wednesday volunteers.

Anyway, this Wednesday I was in, and a relatively new volunteer was in too, as was my best beloved and the Syrian.

The latter two were talking in Arabic and the new volunteer and I were talking about how strange it was to listen to a language when you couldn’t catch anything familiar – if it was Italian or French or Greek or Spanish, you would pick up something but with Arabic , there was nothing.

Then the nice Syrian man looked at me and smiled and said, ‘No, no.’

The best beloved explained they had been searching through the dictionary for the best word for bossy.

The new volunteer was found giggling in the corner.

 

 

 

Another Day in A Life

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For regular readers, and I know there are one or two ( thank you very much), this might be a bit repetitive – more on the life of an ordinary Oxfam bookshop.

And some days it feels a bit like that for me too, but then you have those days when you stumble across all sorts of weird and wonderful books.

So here is what I found at the bottom – it always is at the bottom – of a box:

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Well, well, I thought, there is indeed a book out there on any subject in the world you can think of. And, dear reader, thumbing through it was a real eye opener.

Dedicated readers will know of the Petersfield Porn shelf in our shop where we stash all those rather racy books we cannot put out on the shop floor, and we keep for the owner of the second-hand bookshop in the town who buys them in a job lot.

Even more dedicated readers will recall that our book expert wants Petersfield to be the porn hub of Oxfam on the basis that erotica gets thrown out, but some of it is worth a lot of money – so all the other bookshops should send theirs to us. He made this impassioned appeal at a volunteer conference but sadly, none has yet arrived.

And then there was this – handed to me by a fellow volunteer who said, ‘You will put this in a blog I expect.’ So, here it is.

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Then there were the several, actually many, boxes of Mills and Boon. I would not say it was the complete oeuvre on the basis that would be so many books, we would be filled to bodice brimming – but certainly there were a lot of them.

We used to send them on to the shop in Cosham which relished – and sold – them but sadly Cosham Oxfam is no more.

They were all in very good condition which suggests they were recently bought and read, and the feminist in me is appalled – but maybe given a spare moment, I might want to know how the seductive miss worked….and where else would you see the word ‘reprobate’ on a book cover?

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And then there is this gem. It is a lovely book with all sorts of illustrations and samples of wood to show the cabinet maker what they were working with.

The cover is designed by Talwin Morris who was, according to Wikipedia ‘ a prolific book designer and decorative artist working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly known for his Glasgow Style furniture, metalwork and book designs.’

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Finally, I was jus wondering what to do with two donated camping stoves when I came across this little gem and thought there is a box of camping stuff to be started here so should you have any books on camping or caravanning that you have no need of, please drop them off.

I have to say that the ‘cheese a broccoli rolls ‘ did not sound all that appetising….

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Dilettante Blogging

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As with most things in my life, I am a rather dilettante blogger.

I am gratified and, rather childishly, thrilled when I see from the statistics that a heady 24 people have visited it on one day, but I don’t do anything about promoting it.

Not really sure what categories and tags are about, and only having the link on my email signature because the nice algorithm did it for me, I can’t claim to be anything other than a seriously self-indulgent writer.

Therefore, I take my hat off to people who do it so much better than me – nicely shot and embedded photos, posh layout, hundreds, nay thousands, of followers, all sorts of inventive links and stuff and stuff.

Being a woman of a certain age – when I started writing, it was on a typewriter –  and I am lax about keeping up with any technology that doesn’t find itself into my daily life.

The effort to get better at it is always derailed by a dog walk, supper to cook, a book to read or more to the point, a few hundred Oxfam books to sort.

So fuzzy photos and lazily laid out copy, lax interest in many other blogs, and writing when I feel like it rather than having commitment to get stuff out there as often as possible, and no promotion whatsoever, are what works for me.

(I only just realised that though you can schedule when your blog is posted it goes up on Facebook and Twitter that moment, so I seem to have splurged all over the place when I had hoped to spread myself about a bit.)

So, as I say, I take my hat off to anyone who does it better than me and there are no doubt millions.

But at this point I want to take the aforementioned hat off to a friend who has turned his blog about living the Good life into a book.

Tom and Barbara Good and their two children Rather and Jolly ( yes, they are indeed nom des plumes) live on a small holding in Herefordshire and Tom has written the tale of how they did it – warts and all.

Once when we were working together, he told me how to set up a basic blog and encouraged me to go for it and this, dear reader, is the result.

But whereas I just witter about what I think at that moment, he has a story to tell and I have to admit that I have been reading it rather more avidly than my current book club book which is rather ernest and worthy, albeit good for me.

I spot things I know about him and his family and things I didn’t, and it makes me laugh – a real antidote to the book club book.

One chapter mentions something I once wrote, and I was so delighted.

By the way, it wasn’t all frills and frippery of presentation but a good/Good story and in the end that is what matters to middle-aged Deepest Sussex Housewives.

So, I will refrain from scheduling this witter, and I will have no pretensions about making a good tale out of my life, but I will keep on writing.

Now though, the supper needs cooking, the dog needs walking and there is a chair which needs upholstering.

And here is the link the to his book

Just a snapshot

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A few months ago I discovered three photograph albums at the bottom of a box.

I am not sure why treasures are hidden at the bottom of boxes, but it is nearly always the case.

Anyway, these needed some researching – they were clearly old and of the aristocracy and were in what would have been very nice albums in the 1860s.

As is the way, I put them on a high up shelf  (out of the way and not likely to get thrown away by mistake) ready to ‘have a go at’ when I had time.

I got them down once to show our antiquarian book expert who said, yes, they were interesting but neither of us had much time, so they went back up there and I forgot about them.

This week, he came into the shop for a few hours and rootling among the  books I couldn’t value or didn’t know how to describe in the internet and needed him to look at, I found the photo albums.

There is something about old photos because of the effort needed to produce them – the subject sitting still for a long time, for a start.

I thought of the thousands of photos I have on my laptop – taken instantly, in colour, many taken on my phone and most of which don’t have much in the way of artistic merit – then again these albums are full of rather unattractive, stern looking, rich Victorians….

Neither of us are photographic experts so we did what anyone would do, and set about Google.

We worked out that at least one of the albums had been put together by Lord Raglan and we think he was the son of the more famous father. ( Papa had sent off the Charge of the Light Brigade.)

We also discovered there had been a relatively recent battle over the inheritance of the title, and all it entailed, between two nephews of the childless 5th Lord Raglan – you can read about this in an entertaining sidetrack https://www.ft.com/content/5b3fa2e2-6194-11e3-916e-00144feabdc0.

Anyway, whilst reading around this court battle we found the name Jonathan Spencer and he was the lawyer for the British nephew ( the one who thought he was going to inherit, only to find the 5th Lord had decided his American nephew would get it all.)

Rootling around, we came up with contact details for Jonathan Spencer and decided to give him a call to see if the family would be interested in having the photos back – for a small consideration of course.

I was rather surprised that such an eminent lawyer would answer his own phone but not half as surprised as Dorset solicitor Jonathan Spencer was – he had never heard of the Raglan Row ( as we are now calling it,) leave alone been the lawyer involved.

So, back to Google to find another route.

By this time, I had taken the albums home to spend an evening seeing what I could find out.

I discovered that some of the photos were taken by notable photographers and the ones of Queen Vic and Albert were taken by someone who was appointed to do that for her.

Others were prominent photographers of the well-to-do.

In case you are interested: Camille Silvy, and the National Portrait Gallery has stuff of his – that made my heart beat a little faster but for all I know, they have millions of his old photos, worth not very much.

(He went back to France thinking he had been poisoned by the chemicals used for developing but, according to Wikipedia, he probably had manic depression and indeed his self-portrait does not show a jolly chap.)

Then there are John Mayall, Negretti & Zambra and W & D Downey  – the Downeys were brothers from Newcastle who made good in London.

But I still don’t know if we are sitting on a small goldmine of early photography or whether they are not interesting to anyone at all.

Through a friend, I have made contact with the book department at Bonhams and have sent off an email, with attached images.

Through Facebook, I have made contact with a friend of a friend and likewise sent off images.

All I can do now is wait, and in the meantime it is back to sorting paperback fiction.

Friends of Friends

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My circular walk takes me and Jessie from our back door up to the South Downs Way, along a bit and then down and back round – I have to say that I am just boasting about this as it has no real relevance – neither has this picture of Jessie, not least as it is a summer picture, but please, as they say, live with me on this.

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Today was frosty and bright with lovely sun and it was a delight to be out and walking in such weather and seeing the views. But like all things, you get complacent about your surroundings.

So, instead of just walking and admiring the view, I took to musing what I would do with a significant lottery win. I am not talking a million or two here, I am going for Euro Millions.

Now and then I buy a lottery ticket just so that I can have this fantasy, and it works on a walk, especially useful if it is not cold, lovely and clear, but a drudge of a walk through mud and rain.

After taking care of immediate family, and donations to charities involved in causes I believe in – refugees, clean water, the amazing Medicine San Frontier, education for girls – there is still a lot of Euro Millions left over.

I can’t believe I will ever stop buying my clothes from charity shops or rescuing ‘brown’ furniture from auctions.

So, after we have bought a bigger house and clean, dry barns to be a home to such thing as Georgian dressers (bought at a fraction of the price that some pine number would fetch), there will still, as I say, be a lot leftover.

But thanks to my walk, I have a plan.

I am going to set up a fund called Friends of Friends.

The idea is that anyone we know who wants to do a project which has some benefit to other people gets some money.

It can’t be money just to make someone’s life easier – worthy though that would be – it has to be of interest/use to others.

It doesn’t have to be charitable – it can be a business, and event, an entertainment, a project, but it has to benefit more than just the person getting the money.

It is only available to people with two degrees of separation from us – that, of course dear reader, means someone we know, or someone who knows someone we know.

Already I can think of someone who could make some really interesting art projects in Liverpool and another who could utilise buildings in deepest Herefordshire to run very special courses to help people do better presentations and lots of other things.

I know someone who is trying to change the world through advanced storytelling – or at least he was last time I talked to him.

Someone else would probably have a project up her sleeve for women in Bosnia, another would have an idea or two about what could be really useful in York…..

By the time I was heading back up our lane, I had started to outline the email I would send round everyone I know, with the criteria.

And I was planning how many interesting times we would spend at the opening of these ventures.

So, I got home after my walk (all 11,000 steps of it ) and told the Best Beloved that I was going to the village shop to get a paper, a lottery ticket, and why.

And, he said a long time ago when he had been dealing with big, big sums of money and people competing for it, he had thought then of how good it would be to create the same kind of thing but generously and philanthropically.

Go for it, he said.

So if you have an idea or project that would fit the bill, I would love to hear about it.

But, I have to say, I have not won the lottery – yet.

The Cellar

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We have a lovely American couple coming to stay soon and we once visited them in New Hampshire where everything was white picket fences and retro diners that served pancakes, bacon and maple syrup.

My sister has always had a penchant for horror movies and spent quite a lot of her late night youth on the sofa with our dog for comfort and protection, scaring herself half to death by watching horror movies.

( She is now teaching my niece the delight of thrilling yourself by being scared. Maybe a good lesson in life.)

These two facts may not seem connected but it my (very limited) experience of horror movies, white picket fences and innocuous looking towns often feature.

I looked at the pretty houses in this town in New Hampshire and wondered who was lying in the cellar with an axe in their head or was waiting for night so they could get up and stalk the locals.

Though I do understand the dramatic necessity, the idea that someone hearing some noise in the cellar, when the storm has cut off the electricity or you are a young woman alone in a house under strange circumstances, then creeping down the cellar steps is just plain idiotic.

Don’t go down. Stay where you are and pile all the furniture you can lay your hands on against the cellar door.

Or, get out and run to the nearest house with lights on and a family car parked outside.

Lock yourself in the toilet.

Anything but go down the cellar steps – are you stupid?!

We have a cellar and to be honest it holds no fears except for the need to stop just piling unused stuff down there and have a good clear out.

However, our dog has never set foot down any one of the cellar steps in all her life and will stand, at the top, waiting for you to come up unscathed, or meet a dreadful fate beyond her control.

Wise dog.

Art in Our House

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We have quite a lot of art in our house – some of it brought from our previous lives (and quite different tastes ) and therefore some pieces are having to live cheek by jowl with pieces they would never normally want to cohabit with.

In our bedroom we have what I think is a great piece. Painted for me by a struggling artist – he swapped this piece for a sofa I wanted to get rid of – it is an abstract made up of lots of small squares in which you can find all sorts of images if you look at it in the right way.

I can find hens in a wintery yard, hook-nosed man, birds, reindeer..… sorry this is not a good image of it but you, dear reader, get the general idea.

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It used to hang it in my sitting room in a previous life and many a friend has sat on the sofa – obviously not the one I swapped for it – and found all sorts. Mostly they had a wine glass in their hands, but it whiled away many a pleasant half hour or so.

As it was painted for me. So it has a lot of snow in it. I like it very much.

(That cannot be said of my best beloved and my family who with the exception of my very smart, insightful, artistically thoughtful niece, seem to have no inclination appreciate it at all.)

In our sitting room we have some pictures which really, badly needed lighting better and it is amazing what a difference good lighting makes to how a painting looks.

Never ones to go half measures, we set about designing and installing really good lighting appropriate to each picture.

No, of course we didn’t.

But we did buy, from Ikea as it happens, a central fitting with directional lights so each picture now gets its own lighting. It works very well.

But it does show up that the painting of Aunt Jessie needs some attention. Aunt Jessie is some relative of the best beloved’s mother’s family but we have no more details.

 

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Isn’t she an amazing woman?

She used to hang above a mantlepiece in Brussels which could be seen from the street and more than once, a passing neighbour would stop us and say how much they liked to see her as they walked past.

One day soon we will get her cleaned up and the small tear in her mended.

But what needs more urgent attention are the more than 20 pictures which we have earmarked for the small bedroom.

Framed by the BB way back in the Autumn, they are waiting to be hung.

It is a testament to this year’s good weather that we decided to wait until there were some grey days when we weren’t doing anything else to set about hanging them.

As I speak I can see them over my left shoulder, all propped up and anxious to be hung….

Remind me one day to show you all the lovely woodcuts I have found in books falling apart and the hare painting, and while I am it, remind me to tell you about the Japanese images we have got in the kitchen and the two images my BB bought as cards for me to describe our relationship, and then remind me to talk about how we bought the painting by a Brussels painter of the walk we used to do – and it is a snow image, and the boat painting we bought in the Paris antiques market and the painting I bought him when he thought I was leaving him – and he loves best , and the one over the sofa in the kitchen, painted by the same artist who did my bedroom painting – this time I swapped it for a bed…….

 

The Sussex Housewife Syndrome

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There are some days when I realise just what a Sussex Housewife I have become and some days when I see another example of the tribe and don’t like it.

The other day, and dear reader this is my annual moan about the after Christmas donation ‘boom’ to our Oxfam bookshop, there was a woman who brought in some books.

It is not an absolute rule, but more often than not a snitty donator gives crap books and never buys from us.

( Nice donators do too, but at least they are nice about it.)

She was a Sussex Housewife like myself so there might have been some tribal loyalty, but oh no.

We were stashed out with books and I was on my own sorting them. There were boxes, carrier bags, black bags, piles, heaps, crates, of books.

She walked in with a bag of books and handed them to me saying, ‘ I need my bag back and I have more in the car so if you could empty that bag quickly, as I am parked illegally, I will bring the next lot.

I asked how many more she had as we were rather over-filled – as, I might add, she could see.

‘ I have as many as I have and no, I didn’t count them individually before I brought them to you. But as I said, I am in a hurry so could you just empty the bags quickly.’

She might as well have said, ‘You can’t get the grateful charity volunteers these days, no more than you can get good staff.’

All of her books went in a sack. They were some old law books, written on, out of date, unsaleable.

Followed by bags of battered, dated cookery books, browned paperback fiction and a few Jeremy Clarkson’s for good measure.

I was tempted to just hold a sack open and get her to empty them in but of course, we don’t do that.

So, I have spent a lot of the past couple of weeks, practising my sweet smile in the face of adversity.

But just as I am mentally spitting venom at the Sussex Housewife syndrome, I come up short against myself.

This week, my book club is meeting to discuss an intense, pre-war Norwegian book. If that isn’t Sussex Housewife, goodness knows what is.

And to make matters worse, we are meeting in a nice local restaurant and the book title, and subject matter, is Hunger.

No Trace Remains

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Some years ago my best friend and I walked sections of the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path and very lovely it was.

She was map-reader in chief and my role was to enliven our walk with snippets from a guide book.

‘As you rise steeply from the beach you will be passing the site of XX Castle – of which no trace remains,’

Now, there were a lot of similar sentences in that book and whilst I am prepared to believe that there were a lot of castles on the coast of Wales, for so many to have left so few traces is rather suspicious.

It is not as if the stone has been used for local dwellings which is often the case with under-used castles, because the local dwellings are usually pebble-dashed bungalows and I for one, am not convinced they have a strong layer of castle stone underneath all those pebbles.

Anyway, I was reminded of this ‘no trace remains’ phrase when we were recently in Stratford-Upon Avon, home of the bard.

Of course there are loads of references to Shakespeare – every second shop is Shakespeare’s bakery or bookshop or something- but not much of a real trace remains.

Yes I know,there is the house where he was born with several engaging guides dressed in appropriate costumes who can point to gloves like those which Shakespeare senior might have made in this workshop and painted wall-hangings like those his mum might have brought as part of her dowry.

And there is a child’s sized bed which pulls out from under the adults’ and its base is a criss-cross of rope with a device to pull the strings taught – from which comes the phrase ‘sleep tight.’ Which is interesting but no one has the faintest idea if Shakespeare slept on something similar.

And then there is the place where the house he once owned stood – now it is a garden, unimpressive very small museum, and of course, expensive gift shop.

But all in all, not much of a trace remains.

Which, of course, is not putting off the millions of tourists which go there to see the merest sniff of a trace magnified into various ‘attractions.’

We stayed in the White Swan which was all very nice and old and cosy etc etc. (As far as I am aware it has no real connection whatsoever with Shakespeare.)

Above the mantlepiece there was a quote written in suitably Olde Englishe script and it said, ‘I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety. Henry Vactz. ‘

‘ Well,’ I said to my best beloved, ‘ At least half of that  quote worked. I have never heard of him. Looks like he might have been Czech though.’

‘What?’ he said, ‘ That’s Henry V Act 3.’

The Archers & Game of Thrones

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I am probably not the only middle-aged woman in Deepest Sussex who is a very keen consumer of The Archers and Game of Thrones, probably…

An Oxfam colleague and I came across a whole heap of the George R R Martin books in the bottom of a box and, rather to my surprise, he said/admitted he and his wife were addicted to both the books and the television series.

He encouraged me to take the first in the series and said he was sure I would be a happy reader. Yes, dear reader, I was.

I am not about to go into a critical analysis of the books but suffice it to say there is a lot of historical allusions and I rather like that in my fantasy book, between lots of gory violence and no mean amount of sex.

The best beloved thought about buying me the box set of the first series but then realised he could get it all from LoveFilm.

Now we spend many a happy evening ploughing through them and I have learned to stop saying,’Oh but it’s not like that in the book. They …..’ It doesn’t go down all that well.

(After long and stressful days, we have been known to resort to an episode or two of Doc Martin but we try not to admit that in public.

But now we salivate over the nest series of Game of Thrones. I do realise they are different genres and Martin Clunes might find himself adrift in Westeros.)

Game of Thrones allusions have been making their way into our conversations.

Up on the Malvern Hills the other day we were pretty sure that the wildings would be living on the Herefordshire side and our friend with the small holding near Bromyard should be on the lookout.

I do realise this won’t mean much to anyone who has never bothered with the series so instead of amusing you with even more conversational allusions, I will desist.

Except to say that a regular comment on any aspect of the news these days is ‘Winter is Coming!’

The Archers of course are one long box set, running year after year, after year after year stretching back in my case to my early twenties. (At least now I am in the proper, ageing, Radio 4 demographic.)

I find it mildly amusing to know that I share a hairdresser with Shula, who lives nearby shacked up with Brian. I know, I know, you didn’t think that was happening did you…

The best beloved has worked rather hard to tune out of The Archers for all the years I have known him but of course, even he, did get into the Helen and Rob story line.

It is surprising who you meet who are Archers fans – the most unlikely of people sometimes, and of course it is part of the fabric of Radio 4 – and I am an unashamed wall-to-wall Radio 4 listener.

Way back, on Radio 4 I first heard The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and raved about it to my fellow students – as you can imagine a Radio 4 listening, bread baking, dog owning, mostly non-drinking student as I was, was viewed as odd but then as I had found the only centrally-heated flat for miles around, I was indulged.

I like Desert Island Discs, I love I Am Sorry I haven’t a Clue and am even willing to tolerate Money Box and Poetry Please. The trouble is that Radio 4 does a lot of repeats then a weekly round up of the best of the output so you can hear the same thing quite a lot of times.

(In a spirit of full confession and in the sure knowledge not many people will read this, I have to admit that I am not a huge fan of the Shipping Forecast.

I’d like to be, and I understand why people do like it but for me, I am happy when it is over and The World Service kicks in and I can hear about revolutionary sheep farming in Nigeria or whatever.)

But then you do hear stuff on Radio 4 that is quite marvellous. Just last week, for example, there was the story of two people who had both been wrongfully jailed for many years – him in Northern Ireland and her in America. They had met at an Amnesty International Conference and ended up together.

They bought a place in the quiet countryside and set up a refuge, half-way house whatever you might call it, for other people who got out after years of being locked up for something they never did.

Listening to them and the people they had helped was just fascinating.

So, though I realise Radio 4 is made for me – lefty, liberal, middle-aged and thus it feeds my own world view, I am not giving up and challenging myself to anything new – except of course another episode of Game of Thrones which is not really my world.