There is life beyond Oxfam and researching Victorian botanists (and their books) and various mutinies (in their books) see also another blog (or two) (this is by way of a break from that) – and one of those thing is the Repair Cafe.
So, we have a village(s) Repair Cafe. (Too many brackets perhaps…)
That means that once a month, we get together some fixers/tinkerers/repairers/sewers/menders and in comes everything from a broken purple parasol, a toaster, a jumper with moth holes in it, a lopsided chair, something needing special glue, children’s clothes with rips, a bit of your Mum’s old china with a broken handle, gardening equipment which needs sharpening….
(Well, it is a gardening area so we get a lot of those.)
A 1940s angle poise lamp, an electric guitar, a broken spear – yes indeed – a snapped handle on a saucepan, a small toy with its stuffing lost and an ear missing…..
There is tea/coffee and cake.
There are people who come frequently to just have a chat with other people whilst something is being fixed.
And that is an essential part of what we are about.
You can be told that your broken toaster is unfixable – but at least you know that you can take it to the dump with a clear conscience.
On the other hand, you can have your broken chair glued back together and take it home to use and enjoy it.
Your broken spear can be fixed – though I am not sure of how that will be used in our peaceful village(s).
There is a delicate bedspread which comes in every month for a little bit more of repairing – just a little bit every time.
There are collars turned, and I have to say, quite a lot of electrical appliances that just need a new fuse in the plug – but hey ho that makes them work.
The fixers chat about what they have been fixing in between times, the sewers patiently make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Volunteers bring homemade cakes, make tea and coffee, take donations, log in the items to be fixed, sort out who is going to fix what, make sure we have a total of what has been repaired, fixed, and saved.
It is busy and chatty and yes, it is small beer when you think of what we all throw away but it is something.
We have an allied project to bring swallows and (no, not amazons) martins backs to the villages(s).
It is organised by an amazing sewer and organiser, the human-designed nests are helped to be built by an ex-surgeon – and volunteers.
Every month, people turn up asking for news on the project.
The Repair Cafe is a project which started with fingers crossed and a few volunteers.
There are Repair Cafes all over the place, we are certainly not the first.
But there is something special every month about what our fingers crossed achieved.
If you have something you need fixed and you happen to live near Petersfield you could do worse than spend a bit of your Saturday morning with us.
There is a rule about to-do lists which my sis taught me – always put something at the top that you have already done.
It makes you feel better, and gets you off to a good start.
There is another rule which I learnt yesterday when there was biblical rain and wind and August was looking a whole lot like November and you are stuck inside.
Write your list of things you should/could/would like to do – not urgent, but would make you feel like you had accomplished something – when the weather is good and/or you feel positive.
So, I slouched and cooked – always a fall back – yesterday, and did little else so didn’t feel I had accomplished anything, yet today when the sun is shining I could write a whole long list.
I am planning to put that list on the fridge door in case it rains again – and this being this year, it could well.
Now I am fine when it is actually November because I am used to finding something to do when you really don’t want to be outside, but in August it has come as an unpleasant surprise.
But here goes – and sorry sis don’t have anything I have done (yet).
Do a Marie Kondo my clothes – that really means clearing a pile of stuff off my bedroom chair, rootling around in drawers to find those bras I never wear and getting rid of them, keeping that dress I promise myself I will get into in a month….., hanging up stuff in order which can mean anything from dresses to jackets or colour coding or actually pretty much anything which will keep me amused for an afternoon of pouring rain.
Downsize something – one of these fine days we will have to move out of our house which though is only 2 1/2 bedrooms has a cellar, two garages and a loft – stuff has to go.
Knobs and cutlery – we have brass knobs on our doors and they only get polished just before we have a lot of people for lunch sometime in December. I could do an August version…. We have old cutlery gathered from flea markets over the years and which do not do well in a dishwasher. Assuming you do have cutlery which is nightly stashed in the dishwasher, you will not be aware that old fork prongs get stained by eating eggs. Yes, there are sometimes when we eat egg and chips. If you get them immediately into hot and soapy water, that should work but hey ho, we don’t. So they get stained/need cleaning.
Find something to cook with whatever spice/mix you bought for that recipe you saw, did once and now can’t remember – just before it goes out of date.
Clear out the freezer – remind yourself how nice it was to have your niece do that for you when she was young and would create an excel spreadsheet of what was where. Now, just get the food on shelves and get rid of that stuff in small bags that you knew at the time would come in useful, but now you have no idea what it is or when it was out there.
Decide to be a better person – find something to learn to stave off dementia, for example. Make resolutions about, well anything. Actually, that happens all the time – I am always deciding to be a better person but deciding is not actually doing.
Clean the skirting boards – now this is something that a dog-walking friend of mine does when she is bored. Mind you she is a cleaner so the house will have been done from top to bottom before she gets to that. I have to say, only in lockdown did I ever think, ‘Oh, what shall I do today? The skirting boards might need a once over.’
Write something – well I did yesterday but that was about Naval mutinies based on a book which came into the shop and really, you have to be in for the long haul if you read that.
I am sure there are many other things I could add to the list but next time it is a rainy weekend, I might well just do something from the list.
Recently we had a lovely donation of old natural history books – and so we are off to the countryside, books in hand.
The donation came after someone’s father died and he was clearly someone who had a particular interest in butterflies and moths (more on that another time.)
But not exclusively as this little book shows:
It is good to know that the young ladies of England have the appropriate study of botany to keep them from going wild…
Mind you the book plate suggests that it was rather better used by a (young) man.
Now this one is also clearly intended for the amateur but I do have to question how simple the simple method is….
And then there is this little delight.
Knowing the difference between a hippo and a rhino, a crane and a heron and a frog and a toad is always handy – not that in the 1800s you were likely to see any hippos or rhinos unless you were a very intrepid traveller.
But what is interesting is the introduction and the owner’s name.
So, it was bought in 1858.
Darwin published Origin Of The Species in 1859.
I wonder if the un-named author/editor would have changed their views on nature being the proof of the wisdom of the Deity….
So even back in the day there were lots of Peter Pan books published and he still keeps going, and lots of a print run means less value, so what is this one worth?
This lovely book came in and I set about working out what it might be worth.
Well there were lots of versions but none of them were exactly like ours – I called in our expert and here are the things we needed to think about.
There is no publication date in the book.
So is it a first edition of this version of the book? Well, we are going with that and that means I need to describe it in the listing as ‘first edition thus.’
It certainly isn’t the first edition ever published ( I wish) but it is ( we think) the first edition of this version of this book.
Mabel Lucie Attwell is the illustrator and she is still very popular in a rather charming/kitsch/of her era way.
So, she adds value and though the book is somewhat ‘foxed’ (I’ll explain) that doesn’t affect the plates (the pictures.)
We think, given a bit of research that she did this book in the 1920s but not enough research to find out the exact year……
More of MB Attwell later.
Foxing is the reddish-brown spots or splodges on pages and are apparently caused by age and contaminants.
Infact, did you know and I am pretty sure you didn’t, that there is no foxing in incunabula which (just in case you were not entirely sure) are books printed/created before 1500.
Anyway, back to the book.
It has a cover/dust jacket and that makes a huge difference.
A dust jacket makes the value of the book much more interesting.
Now I don’t want to assume you are not a dust jacket expert, but just in case:
It is the paper cover which has the nice pictures on it and ‘covers’ the ‘boards’ which are the main covers.
They get damaged and some people – including an Oxfam volunteer who was promptly and firmly put right on the matter – think that a scrappy dust jacket should be thrown away and you are left with the rather cleaner board covers of the book.
Never – just saying.
Another thing that matters is whether it is priced clipped. In case you are not 100 per cent sure what that means, it is whether or not the price always printed on the bottom left hand corner of the dust jacket’s fold into the front inside cover – got that image in your mind?
Who would have thought that mattered, but indeed it does.
So, not where are we up to deciding what this book is worth?
Well, the dust jacket is really important as I said, and it is in pretty good condition.
That means: it has small tears where it has been handled and put in and out of shelves.
It does not have major tears, rips, scribbled on it, bits missing….
The other thing which is an issue, especially with children’s books is ‘internal markings’ which is anything from polite underlining of words or passages to energetic scribbles across pages.
We have none – except a lovely inscription ‘To Elizabeth with all Mummie’s and Daddy’s love’
Now, back to Mable Lucie Attwell.
She was ‘known for her cute, nostalgic drawings of children.’
So, no surprise when she was called on to illustrate a famous children’s story.
‘From1914 onwards, she developed her trademark style of sentimental rotund cuddly infants, which became ubiquitous across a wide range of markets: cards, calendars, nursery equipment and pictures, crockery and dolls.’
‘Attwell’s illustrations caught the attention of Queen Marie of Romania, who wrote children’s books and short stories in English. Attwell was invited to spend several weeks at the royal palace in Bucharest in 1922. She also illustrated two long stories of the queen’s, which were published by Hodder & Stoughton.‘
So with all that, what have we got to sell – after all, we are raising money for a good cause.
Here is how I will list the book on Oxfam online:
Date unknown but thought to be first edition thus. Circa 1920s. Rare and very good condition dust jacket. Not price clipped. Significant, but relatively light, foxing throughout not affecting 12 colour plates. Many black/white other illustrations.
Clean with no internal markings except a small ink previous owner’s name on front endpaper/
All in all, a very nice edition of this children’s classic.
As you may have gathered by now, I spend most of my time these days (though in my Oxfam ‘youth’ things were different) looking at what we call the Old and Interesting books donated to the shop.
And, as you may have gathered over the years, many of the books I look at might be old but not necessarily very interesting, but there are enough to make my Oxfam life fascinating (sometimes.)
And I’d really like to tell you about some of the more interesting. But some other time.
I could tell you of the work of many another volunteer – from those who sort, wash, iron and put online the clothes we have had donated ( yes, in despite of being a bookshop), those who then pack them up and send them off, the classical music expert already sorting out special stuff to keep back for Christmas ( yes that word is already being mentioned), the sorting out of Oxfam cards into their allotted slots in the spinner, and so much/many more.
But I don’t know what they do as well as I know what I do, so here is my Monday just as an example of what happens behind the scenes :
I arrived at 8am, wrote and distributed the weekly volunteer update – what we took last week in the shop, counting up the online sales of books, jewellery, music and the odd stuff – a pair of gold, fur-lined gloves ( in July?), the treen boot-jack with integrated boot tools which has been on sale for six months and has finally sold etc etc.
I left to do my pilates class – yes I am a Sussex housewife – and got back at about 10.15 by which time everyone had worked up their questions about what felt like a million things, queries about what to do, :
What was happening with the table and the window, plans for the front-facer books (in case you have forgotten, these are books displayed so you can see their front covers and therefore and really, are more attractive and sell better), where to put the latest donations, and was this book especially interesting, could we have tea and coffee, and by the way did you buy some milk? etc etc.
And could I find a few very small jewellery donations which weren’t yet listed online to fill the miniature pirate cask in the window?
By the way, the window looked great thanks to someone who does a great job at making it so – with the help of the manager’s mother who has knitted rats for the pirates display….
But I needed to put not for sale stickers on the inflatable seagulls (yes seagulls and pirates of course) belonging to another volunteer and clear up some of the window display ‘leftovers’.
I found some jewellery.
Could I find some theme of books for the corner display and clear off the previous display – in case you want to know – books about Japan and a few Japanese artefacts.
So, no I couldn’t think of anything on a theme so just brought down (from the semi-organised chaos upstairs) some lovely-looking, interesting books.
(They sold really well and that means there were gaps, and our smart, great manager said she stood and looked at the gaps in the display the next day and tried to work out what the theme was…… today, we re-filled it with great books we had been wondering where to show them off.)
In the meantime, back in Monday, I had asked someone I knew to come in an PAT test ( proving the items are electrically safe) some model railway stuff which we have had buried behind the boxes of vinyl ( yes they have been there for, well, some months.)
(He needed coffee, space, a conversation, thanks and time to be acknowledged.)
So, I have no idea what these things are but apparently they are worth some £20 each. I also have no idea how to describe them but I will wait until next Monday when a volunteer who knows a bit about this stuff, tells me how to write them up for an Oxfam online listing.
Then two other volunteers came in and they had questions, something just to mention, tea requirements, change for the till because there were two ten pound notes – no good if someone buys a £2.49 book with (yet) another.
So, that was a trip to the bank.
And in between all that, there were donations.
Now, we have an amazing volunteer who cuts through donations like a knife through butter – everything sorted into those that need to go to ‘another’ place ( yes that is a euphemism) and those which will sell, are first editions, signed, unusual.
But there is a rule that says five minutes after he leaves, there is another arrival of donations – and they needed to be dealt with.
Suffice it to say, I was a bit tired at the end of my (extended) shift on Monday.
But in all that I found a book which has been a dandy of a research project and might be worth a good deal.
There is something about an interesting map donation to the Oxfam bookshop which seems to get all sorts of volunteers interested.
And recently we have had some more than usually volunteer-captivating ones.
In an envelope in the back of the book, a colleague found these.
They are the remnants of escape maps.
One of them includes Berlin – so a brave person who went in there.
In case you don’t know, and we didn’t, maps were printed on parachute silk and/or rayon fabric and given to people making their way into ( and hopefully out of ) enemy territory in WW II.
(And if you will excuse me being rather clumsy, they are a nice escape from someone’s house clearance of less than riveting books. Of course, we love all the books donated but you know, now and then……)
Originally, they would have been larger and square and the fact that someone has cut them down to make, what? A small place mat? has rendered them a lot less valuable than they would have been.
The printing is amazingly clear and of course the fabric meant you could scrunch it up to nothing, hide it in your pocket, make into a hatband when in disguise, put into a slit in the lining of a jacket…. ( both true apparently.)
And there was none of that difficult, time-consuming folding and unfolding of a linen or paper map with which anyone whose been on a long walk in familiar territory, leave alone enemy territory, is all too familiar.
Courtesy, as ever, from Wikipedia:
During World War I Australians produced an escape map for use in July 1918 by prisoners in the German Holzminden POW Camp, sections of map were sewn into the clothing of prisoners who escaped via a tunnel to Allied territory.”
Some American intelligence offices visited the UK in 1942 to be briefed on the British efforts in escape and evasion techniques and equipment.
The British MI9 gave the Americans a book or manual called “Per Ardua Libertas” to take back to the US. Published in this manual were examples of each cloth escape and tissue escape map that the British had produced.
After this meeting with the British, the United States began to produce its own escape maps. Most of the American maps supplied by the Army Map Service from World War II were actually printed on rayonacetate materials, and not silk.
However, because of the silky texture of the materials, they were referred to by the more familiar textile name.
During WWII hundreds of thousands of maps were produced by the British on thin cloth and tissue paper. The idea was that a serviceman captured or shot down behind enemy lines should have a map to help him find his way to safety if he escaped or, better still, evade capture in the first place.
Many of these maps were also used in clandestine wartime activities.
Apparently, 35,000 servicemen and men and women on secret missions escaped safely during WW II and it is estimated half of them used some form of escape or evasion map to do it.
But it wasn’t just servicemen ( and maybe women on secret missions) who had these maps.
And they weren’t all made of silk or rayon:
The cloth maps were sometimes hidden in special editions of the Monopoly board game sets sent to the prisoners of war camps. The marked game sets also included foreign currency (French and German, for example), compasses and other items needed for escaping Allied prisoners of war.Escape maps were also printed on playing cards distributed to Prisoners of War which could be soaked and peeled apart revealing the escape map. Other maps were hidden inside spools of cotton thread in sewing kits. “Due to the inherent strength and extremely compact nature of the MI9mulberry leaf tissue maps, they could be wound into twine and then rolled into the core of cotton reels.
I have disappeared down a bit of an WW II escape rabbit hole so do feel free to leave if you don’t need to know anymore.
But before you go, we will put our unfortunately-mangled maps for sale online and I will wonder whose were they? What was the story of if and how they were used, why were they cut down….
For anyone still with me, I was wondering what MI9 was.
During World War II it had two principal tasks: (1) assisting in the escape of Alliedprisoners of war (POWs) held by the Axis countries, especially Nazi Germany; and (2) helping Allied military personnel, especially downed airmen, evade capture after they were shot down or trapped behind enemy lines in Axis-occupied countries.
During World War II, about 35,000 Allied military personnel, many helped by MI9, escaped POW camps or evaded capture and made their way to Allied or neutral countries after being trapped behind enemy lines.
The best-known activity of MI9 was creating and supporting escape and evasion lines, especially in France and Belgium, which helped 5,000 downed British, American and other Allied airmen evade capture and return to duty.
The usual routes of escape from occupied Europe were either south to Switzerland or to southern France and then over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain and Portugal.
MI9 trained Allied soldiers and airmen in tactics for evading and escaping and helped prisoners of war to escape by establishing clandestine communications and providing escape devices to them.
The person credited with creating the various ways to make, give and send escape and evasion maps was Christopher Hutton:
a British soldier, airman, journalist and inventor, best known for his work with MI9.
And, just so you know, MI9 no longer exists but whilst it did, it had a section:
“Q,” staffed by Christopher Hutton and Charles Fraser-Smith, was charged with inventing devices to aid soldiers to evade or escape capture. “Q” was made famous in fiction by the James Bond movies.
Next to our holiday balcony, there was another one used by a woman on her own.
I used to spend holidays on my own and I know there is pleasure, and less pleasure, about being on your own.
So, I asked her if she would like to share some wine with us one evening.
She was there to spend time with her son and his girlfriend, working all the hours god sent in the summer to make money.
She waited up to eat with them at the end of their evening shifts.
Meantime, we talked about her life as a single parent, changing her job because of the Greek financial crisis, learning massage as a calming therapy, how her ex-husband was a good father but a rubbish financial provider, her new job, her real wish to retire but there is not enough money in her life…..
Then we got onto immigrants and she said, We all have to understand the new world.
People are just trying to escape, to make a better life, to live their lives to way we do.
Climate change, wars, poverty – they all make people want to move and who can blame them?
We have to learn about how to accept that – all of us.
I have tried to show my son what it means to have a good heart.
She said a lot more, but I think you get the picture
It was a very good way to spend an evening with a stranger.
Some food just tastes better in its original surroundings.
A good greek salad tastes better when you are sitting at a table overlooking the sea, that it ever does at home in Deepest Sussex – even if you have the ripest homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers, the posh feta you have splurged on, really good olive oil.
(Though it has to be said not every Greek salad in Greece is brilliant – just saying.)
But though I am on about Greek food in Greece, can I just add I had one of the best dosas I have had in a long time in a tiny south Indian street place in Athens – see below.
But back to where I was, and apparently, and not entirely surprisingly, the Greek salad as we know it had only been around since the 60s or early 70s.
‘Everything started at the end of the 19th century when the Greeks were still ‘counting the wounds’ from their bankruptcy of 1893 and the Greek-Turkish war of 1897.
The main meal then consisted of vegetables – cucumber, olives, onions and (later) tomatoes and just sometimes cheese, with bread.
If you lived in the countryside, you took your vegetables whole, wrapped in a cloth, to the fields.
If you lived in Athens, you cut them up, put them in a dish and added olive oil, salt and oregano – that’s posh city folk for you.
Apparently, there was some tax which limited what you could charge for a basic salad to locals, and the growing number of tourists arriving in the 60s and 70s.
Folklore has it that an enterprising restauranteur in the Plaka area of Athens dropped a slice of feta on top and that meant it was no longer a basic salad – and he could charge what he liked.
My take aways ( as it were) from this year’s Greek holiday (want a photo – well here you go) were Fava, chickpea stew and lamb baked with thyme ( and no doubt, time.)
Fava, just in case you don’t know, is basically yellow split peas cooked to a creamy mush with added flavourings.
It is a popular appetiser but beware, in the wrong hands it can turnout bland and, occasionally and unforgivably, lumpy.
If you get the flavourings right you can eat it by the spoonful all on its own. If you don’t you need all kinds of additions to make it tasty.
We had a very good version on the day we met our new friends, and the Best Beloved and I had another lovely and delicious lunch with them ( see previous blog about picking up friends on holidays).
It was Sunday lunch.
Unlike in Deepest Sussex , chickpea stew is a local Sunday lunch tradition, cooked for a long time on the stove and in the oven.
It had a dark, almost gravy-ish sauce, was unctuous and generally very good. I am pretty sure it was started Friday and left to its own cooking devices for a good long time and then kept to let the flavours all steep in.
I had the tavern’s speciality of lamb with thyme and though I am sure this is a speciality of eating places across Greece, it was very good indeed.
We left our dog with long-suffering neighbours whilst we went on this jaunt to sun-kissed shores (want another photo? well if you insist.)
And as this island has very little in the way of shopping-for-a-thank-you-present to offer, I decided to bring Greece to them and cook a Greek meal.
So by the time you read this, I will have made a chickpea stew with lamb and thyme and maybe Fava to start.
I will let you know if it was a satisfactory thank you.
The island we were staying on is small so it was not entirely a surprise to bump into the gay couple we had struck up an intersting conversation with in a coffee place the day before.
We kicked ourselves for not arranging to meet them for another coffee, or even lunch.
And despite keeping our eyes peeled, we didn’t catch them again.
That was last year, and there were just the vaguest of hopes that we might see them again this year – but we didn’t.
So, when we were on a beach and I saw a nice looking gay couple I, well basically, picked them up.
Had a chat, and suggested coffee in the nearby restaurant in half an hour.
Coffee morphed into a (delicious) lunch and conversation.
One of the couple was a professor of early renaissance Italian philosophy and history and the other was a family lawyer.
The Best Beloved complained about the way philosophy was taught in Oxford (mind you that was a very long time ago) and the professor explained his way of teaching was to put the ideas in a historical context.
We talked about art (and its context), we talked about what lockdown was like in Rome – not too bad given they have a large airy apartment with a balcony and could eventually escape to their house in the Umbrian countryside.
We talked about the merits of various Greek islands, where to go in Southern Italy, how it was lonely doing all your legal work on Zoom and missing the chat with fellow lawyers and even divorcing clients.
To save the BB from writing holiday suggestions on the back of his hand, gave his email and suffice it to say, the next day he had a lot of holiday suggestions and we made an arrangement to meet for lunch on Sunday.
We get on fine on holiday but there is something good about conversations about things you don’t know with people you don’t know at all.
Picking up gay couples could well be a holiday habit from now on.
Apparently, the right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility according to Malcolm Gladwell – a man who gets a lot of things right.
Sometimes it works brilliantly and sometimes it doesn’t.
Especially on holiday, I don’t exercise the cautionary principle much.
We got talking to one taxi driver and as a result, he spent quite a lot of time slowly driving so he could dictate into Google Translate what he wanted to tell us about basketball – did you know that there was a Greek basketball player in a top league in America? No, nor did we.
Despite the BB’s grandson being a school and weekend basketball player, we soon ran out of conversation to dictate back into Google.
So, to change the subject I said, So what is this part of Athens?
It is toxic, he said.
And then there was, not bothering with Google, a one-sided ‘conversation’ about ‘toxic’ Bangladeshis and other immigrants.
Now, there is no denying that Greece has taken more than its European fair share of refugees and immigrants.
But this was not an easy listen.
The next day, I went out from our hotel and bought some water. From, it turns out, a Bangladeshi man.
He asked where I was from.
England.
You are so very lucky, he said.
Greece? I asked.
Not England, he said. Not so good. Not so good.
There are a hundred things to unpack from these ‘conversations’.
thereluctanthousewife 