Out with nature

August 4, 2023July 23, 2023 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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….

Audrey Hepburn and Mao

July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

So, here’s the Oxfam deal: I have been away for the better part of a month ( more on why in some other blog) and my first full day back is the day before the new area manager arrives.

We want to impress.

When I say we, some of the usual compliment of Thursday people are away – the one who broke their wrist on the May bank holiday and have been very sorely missed since, and the one who I have come to rely on for very impressive creativity and more, needed the afternoon off for all sorts of good reasons.

So, with what resources we had, we worked our socks off.

The volunteer who ‘does’ classical music but also likes books – though not bothered about film – re-did the Old and Interesting section and the DVDs – and I have to say, made them look a whole lot better than I usually do.

And, one of the big issues when you have people further up the food chain visiting, you may well not know, is culling.

You can skip this bit of you need to get to the part that relates to the blog’s title – please feel free, and it is right at the bottom.

Anyway, if you are interested in how Oxfam bookshops work, here is the stuff about culling:

Each and every book has a price, and a category so that we can tell that we are selling more history than self help (and yes, we do), and a number which tells us what what week it was put out for sale.

The theory ( and you will note that it is a theory,) is that there are volunteers akimbo who diligently work their way round the shop checking the dates a book was put out and culling those which have been out for too long.

(You need to refresh your stock or the regulars will get fed up of seeing the same books and not come back.)

But there aren’t volunteers who do that.

Instead, we have volunteers who take responsibility for a category of books.

One does academic – but he is in Italy with his four grandchildren under five.

One does paperback fiction, but is in France on her boat…

You get the picture.

So, on Thursday, after a month away and people away, things were pretty dire and I, with my colleagues went around the shop and checked every single book.

Culled and re-stocked, and when there were not books to re-stock with, I have to say, dear reader, we just rubbed out the week numbers replaced them with the most recent week.

Paperback fiction was put in exactly the right alphabetical order.

Crafts were put in categories – homes, sewing, calligraphy and painting etc.

The amazing woman who does the window, did the window with prints my Best Beloved had framed, of cycling sketches from a Sussex artist, and books on The Great Outdoors.

Here is a lovely book that went in the window – we had been keeping these books for months to make a good display.

( By the way we sold four of the six of prints on that day.)

I did the table with books that all had red covers – eye catching as you come in and, hopefully, impressive to the new area manager.

And, I did the front-facers.

All those books around the shop which are not just spine-facing but actually show you their cover.

But, I didn’t do biography because I reckoned (and I was shattered at the end of Thursday) that the area manager wasn’t coming in until 11 am, so we could squeeze in biography on Friday morning.

We, not just me, did biography and we found – to my delight – there were biographies on Marx, Lenin’s embalmers and Mao – this is not a political delight, but how nice a theme was that?

So, we had them front-facing.

When I went in on Saturday to talk to my manager, I had a look round the front facers to see what had sold.

Mao (surprisingly) had sold and some volunteer had put an autobiography of Audrey Hepburn in its place……

Marx, Lenin and Audrey Hepburn – who would have thought?

The area manger, apparently, thought the shop looked good – phew.

Oxfam Trials, Tribulations and Surprises

April 8, 2018April 18, 2018 / aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

There have been a few trials and tribulations in the Oxfam bookshop of late – and then one really nice surprise with a rather spooky twist.

Oxfam’s trials and tribulations nationally and internationally don’t seem to have filtered down to Petersfield – there seems to be pretty much the same number of people donating to us as ever there was.

Turning out aged parents’ home, downsizing house and therefore books, bibliophiles with a one-in-one-out policy and the collections of religious books with the surprisingly frequent copy of the Kama Sutra tucked in……

(Yesterday was the 5th time in my Oxfam career, I found a copy and usually they are small and rather pretty but this one was the full works including – I had only a quick glance – advice on scratching……)

No, that wasn’t the surprise with the spooky twist.

Neither was the very nice man, Terry, from the Chichester shop.

For this ‘episode’ of the story to work you have to know that we are ruthless about the books we put out for sale. And that means a lot of donations go into recycling sacks.

The book may be in perfectly good order, clean and bright, as we say, but to the best of my book-selling knowledge no one in Petersfield wants a copy of the book about the fairytale marriage of Charles and Diana.

Nether do they want the 2011 Top Gear annual, nor indeed, and it pains me to say this, any of Michael Palin’s books of his travels – although once I sold a copy of Himalaya.

So, the recycling sacks are an essential part of the shop’s DNA but low and behold when the nice East European man came to collect them on Tuesday he didn’t have any empty ones to give us so, by Wednesday ,we had run out.

That means that we had boxes and boxes and bags and piles of books with no long term future sitting around and taking up space.

And it turns out we weren’t the only shop with the problem. I took a call from someone from the Chichester shop asking if we had any spare. But we had none.

We, luckily, get two re-cycling collections a week so I left rather stern instructions that when the man came on Friday we needed two sacks of empty sacks.

He only had one.

There is apparently, a national shortage of the right recycling sacks.

Anyway, we got all our ‘waste’ books into sacks and still had a few leftover and on Saturday I was on the till when a man walked in with a picture.

He told me he was Terry and he had brought us a picture ( a print, not the real thing) by Flora Twort – Petersfield’s only famous (and dead) artist.

He said that he expected we could get more for it in our shop than in Chichester. I was very impressed he had taken he time and bother and so I raided our precious bag of recycling sacks and sent him away with our last armful – he seemed to think it was a fair deal.

Right, to the surprise with a twist.

A colleague had put aside a book for me with a note on it saying someone had priced it at £3.99 but she thought it might be worth ‘a bit.’

Indeed, it is.

So far, our book expert ( with me as his assistant, of course,) think that it is worth in the region of £750 to £850.

It is a large and 1933 version of a A-Z of London with added stuff such as the parliamentary constituencies, legal boundaries, London administrative districts and so on.

And and this is a delight, a tube map pre Harry Beck which is particularly interesting as Beck designed it in 1933 – this book would have gone to print as Harry was busy thinking up his brilliant design.

I suspect, given what I can find by Googling about, that the book will be taken apart, the maps framed and those sold off at a considerable mark up.

But the real spooky surprise was found when I was showing it to a fellow volunteer and we were looking at the maps of where she was born and grew up – then we turned to map of Peckham where I lived for a while.

This book is pristine and someone had a slipcover made to keep it that way. There are no internal markings except one – a biro mark along the road where I used to live in Peckham.

Framing the Birds

January 27, 2018January 21, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

For while, there has been a dearth of donations of old and interesting books to our Oxfam shop – but recently there have been some treats.

I should (re) mention that old and interesting is the category on the till – quite a lot of the time, old does not equal very interesting at all.

Anyway, with Christmas gone and the leftover crackers, candles, cards and so on, consolidated into a few SALE shelves, we had space which needed to be filled with old and interesting so all donations have been welcomed.

Please bear with me, this does get a bit more interesting later on, and to prove the point, here is a lovely picture:

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Meanwhile, a fellow volunteer had mentioned that in the Winchester shop (always to be envied given that it has tourists and university students, which we don’t) had taken plates ( pictures) out of decrepit books and put them in mounts and had them for sale.

We could do that, I thought.

And, by coincidence or the inscrutable movement of the universe, whichever you prefer, a donation came in which would be an ideal candidate.

It was Grimm’s fairy tales illustrated by W Heath Robinson – falling apart and some child had scrawled with crayon over some of the pages, making it unsaleable except to someone who wanted to take out the plates and frame them….

My best beloved is something of a star amateur picture framer so you can see where this is going.

He said, though, the plates were not in great condition and anyway were a bit ‘wishy-washy.’

I was deflated but not despondent on the basis that wishy-washy was better than nothing.

But then we had a treat, actually two treats.

As you know I am an amateur upholsterer – oh what crafts people we both are – anyway, I found this in the back of a book amongst several boxes of books – all old and about Paris.

( I have put a shelf of them out but I think you can only do one such shelf in a Petersfield bookshop – obviously if we were in Winchester…)

fullsizeoutput_cf6

So, French upholsterer to her majesty – presumably Victoria – and doing work for Mr Franck Boggs – great name.

Someone will like that framed, I thought.

And then another book came in, and it had already fallen apart, but what fantastic plates.

It turns out these were produced by two brothers who approached Dent with what they had done, and the publisher said, ‘oh yes please.’

We have the first edition of their first book – but all the pages are loose and couldn’t be sold as a book.

(If you want to know more about Maurice and Edward, here is a link
http://www.avictorian.com/Detmold_Charles_Maurice.html)

They were influenced by Japanese art – very popular at the time – and you can see it in the style.

So, these delights will be framed by the BB and will be the stars of my new bookshop venture. ( I may well keep the book cover for us.)

Nearly Rack and Ruin

November 8, 2017February 22, 2018 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

For one reason or another, I have been away from the Oxfam shop quite a lot in the last couple of months and reluctant though I am to use the phrase ‘rack and ruin’, there was evidence that things weren’t good when I got back.

If I should say that I found a Sopranos box set on the children’s DVD shelf, I might not need to say any more, but I will.

Marigold Hotel on the action movies shelf, for example.

We have a relatively new rule which says that no hardback book should be in the shop priced at less than 2.99 – but lots have (in my absence) been priced at £2.49 and OK it is only 50p but I am guessing that 50p could prove useful in feeding a Yemeni child.

As I have said before, we think of ourselves as a bookshop which happens to be a charity shop, not a charity shop which happens to sell a few books – and that means standards are kept high.

I am more ruthless than most of my fellow book sorters but in my defence, we get lots of comments from customers about how nice the shop is – and of course, we have a small preen.

So, I have spent my last few shifts getting it back in order. Pulling brown-paged books off the shelves, persuading a volunteer’s granddaughter to put all the children’s books in alphabetical order, assigning culling and re-stocking of the different categories to different volunteers and so on.

And yes, of course it looks better.

Anyway enough of a rant.

Here are a few good things.

One regular came in looking for a DVD of French Connection and I knew we didn’t have it and in fact I can’t remember ever seeing it.

So, I went on the net and found one for sale for 50p with no charge for postage. I bought it and sold it to him (there was French Connection II as well) for £4.99 and he was so delighted he came in to say so, several times.

A colleague came up with the idea of doing a shelf of books that would be good as secret santa presents or stocking fillers – she is new and enthusiastic and coming up with very good ideas.

So, we sent for recycling the shelf of ‘self-help and pregnancy care’ books mainly on the grounds that in the eight years I have worked there, I haven’t sold one of those.

And we relegated ‘sport’ on the grounds there are only so many copies of Alex Ferguson and Bradly Wiggins’ autobiographies a shop needs.

Now we have space to sell small humorous books which we never otherwise sell and we have quite a collection of those re-done Ladybird books which were so popular last year and rather to my surprise still seem to be around this year.

Along with Five Do Brexit and endless books on quotations from grumpy old people.

And, since the end of August, I have been putting aside books that are in such pristine state they could be given as a Christmas gift without the recipient ever knowing they are second hand.

We have teetering piles of crates of these books and all of them need up-pricing which is a technical term meaning you can charge more for them than usual because a) they are in great condition and b) it is Christmas spending.

The issue is, when to put them out.

If you go too early, you have nothing left for the last minute buyers but if you go too late, you might get left with them and they won’t sell in January.

If I had a memory, I would recall what we did last year, and when – but I don’t. This year I am going to make a note of what we have, what we do and how it goes down.

Of course I will write that down and put it somewhere safe and it won’t be seen again.

That is the way with our shop – there are things that can be unearthed and have been there, under a shelf, in the back of a cupboard which have been around longer than I have.

On the other hand, you can put something down for a moment and it has disappeared.

That happened with the Yemeni maps.

Some kind soul had donated a number of military maps of Yemen. I was not sure the would have great re-sale value in Petersfield – but kept them anyway.

One of our volunteers is an installation artist and she saw them and wanted to use them in some artwork.

( Yes, strange though this may sound, it is true.)

She rang into the shop when I was there and asked me if I knew what had happened to them.

I had left them in a box by the lift but of course they weren’t there and I spent a good hour looking for them.

It turned out the manager had found them, and hidden them, to keep them safe.

I gave both of them a stern talking to about leaving messages in the message book (which most people never read or use) so that I could have saved myself an hour.

Still it will be very interesting to see how she make an art installation in Petersfield’s square out of Yemeni maps.

Finally, you will be please to hear, in this list of Oxfam doings, I changed the table display this morning.

We always do something for Remembrance Day and usually the shop is knee deep in military history and copies of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but this year we aren’t.

I have scraped together enough books for the table and of course it only has to last until Saturday but as I left the shop, I explained to the volunteer on the till, to try and not sell to many of them too quickly.

Bargain Hunting

February 26, 2017August 10, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There is little I like more than a mission and bargain hunting.

(When I lived in Paris, I would set myself small missions to give structure to otherwise very, very, very boring days. Whether it was seeing a particular picture in the Louvre or buying a wooden spoon from a kitchen shop several miles across the city…..)

Anyway, I was on a couple of missions to Chichester which, luckily, has two auction houses and some good charity shops.

I like auctions a lot.

I like the range of people there, I like the auctioneer’s savvy and the fact they maintain a straight face when a lot doesn’t even manage to get a £10 bid or goes for several thousands of pounds more than the estimate.

Infact one picture – an Indian one with an estimate of £200 went for £22,000. It made the seller very happy as he had picked it up in another auction a few years ago as part of a general lot and paid not very much for it – it is the internet viewing and bidding that has made the difference.

I like seeing the dealers in action and the sheer, nerve-wracking excitement of people bidding for the first time for something they really, really want.

Anyway, we need a replacement for the table in our spare room. The current table worked when the best beloved changed the spare room into a history-writing room, but now he has moved back into his old study, the large table is something that has to go.

So mission number one was a smaller table.

I had been to the Stride and Son auction rooms a week or so before to take the Victorian photo albums – oh please do keep up, all that was in a previous blog – and had had a mooch around the sale room which was gearing up for a sale and found a couple of tables which would work nicely in our spare room.

Each auction is run slightly different and this one had a quirk I hadn’t seen before.

For the first hour or so, everyone was in their back yard bidding for the ‘outside stuff’ which you couldn’t view until the day – so, dear bidder, be quick in your assessment and even quicker with your bidding.

Then everyone moved inside for the posh stuff.

I had seen a very nice Georgian round table in yew and fruitwood which was estimated at £100 to £150.

At the country auction I usually go to, the estimate is a bit optimistic so I pitched up prepared to pay £100 but rather hoping to get it for,say, £60.

After all you have to pay a buyer’s premium on top of the hammer price and that is about 20% – yes I know, quite a lot, but they have to make a living out of all this.

This auction turned out to be a better place to sell than buy. That table went for £220 (before buyer’s premium.)

That is, presumably, the difference between cosmopolitan Chichester (think Westeros, for those of us who know Game of Thrones ) and out in the country north of the Downs (Winterfell) auctions.

I like a bit of yew and fruitwood but I am not proud and there was another similar Georgian table but in mahogany which is nowhere near as popular – but of course this table dates from the 1700s.

It has survived from then and I could own it but, dear reader, ‘brown’ furniture is not in vogue so it goes for less than pine furniture. Can that be true? you ask, indeed it can.

Anyway the latter lot was a long way from the first lot so I went out to hunt around the shops on Mission Two.

I was looking for bits of a wedding outfit – not my wedding you understand – and I went into TK Maxx and found a nice pair of shoes that would do and/but they were £29.99.

I say and/but because my charity shopping personality says, ‘What? How much?’ and so I left them behind.

I then did a fingertip search of the charity shops and found a pair of shoes for £7.

Here they are:

Yes indeed Ferragamo designer shoes, and I paid £7.

Then I found a lovely vintage Jaegar silk scarf – might not work with wedding plans but hey who cares for £4.

And then I went back to the auction. It was still hours, and I really do mean hours away from my lot so I put a commission bid on it and set off home.

Recently I have signed up with the website Saleroom which allows you to bid live online but I wasn’t sure I would be back and sorted out with a bidding identity in time, so I left the commission bid.

I hate doing that because you have no control – if you have left a bid of say £30 then the auctioneer is probably not going to start the bidding at £10 but if you were sitting there and holding your nerve and not bidding too soon, you might get it for say £15.

Or you could be outbid in the room by £5 and if you were sitting there you might be reckless and bid another £5 and get it. But the auctioneer is limited to what you told him to bid – no leeway and no extra fivers.

When I got home, I got logged in and ‘watched’ the sale live and could indeed have bid via the wonders of the internet.

My lot was one of the last ones – everyone is tired, many have gone home – late lot is always a good bet.

I got it for £28.

So, this is a table that has ‘lived’ for more than 300 years, is handmade and with a good polish will look lovely.

Missions complete.

Another Day in A Life

February 19, 2017February 19, 2017 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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:

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.

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?

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.’

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….

Just a snapshot

February 1, 2017 / aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

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.

Blue Trousers

December 16, 2016 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

‘By the way, it’s a black tie event,’ said my best beloved as he headed off to somewhere in Bulgaria leaving me with a very busy week – and nothing appropriate to wear.

I had just sold on eBay the only dress I had which could have passed muster at a black tie event and now had three days before the event and really no time to go shopping.

As you may recall, dear reader, I am a dedicated charity shopper and the thought of paying money for a posh new frock I would not have just cause to wear for the next ten years, seemed just silly.

But one of the first rules of charity shopping is that you cannot go looking for something specific, in your size, in your style, and available on that day – it just doesn’t work like that.

But, optimist that I am, I thought I would find something.

As I mentioned, I did not have a lot of time – book sorting, dog walking, refugee good cause meetings etc etc take up time, even for a Sussex Housewife.

So, I raced around the charity shops of Petersfield and took stock, as it were.

That looked nice, but not on me. That was nice too, but sadly wouldn’t go over my shoulders or pulled the other way, past my bum. That was a nice colour, but that was all that was nice about it. That looked like something my gran would have thought nice. And so on.

In the end I went back to my wardrobe and rootled out a rather lovely garment that I had worn for a friend’s wedding evening do.

It is a bright green turquoise with yellow embroidery – bear with me, dear reader, it is striking, but not garish. It is long and has what we used to call, in my youth, a Mandarin collar – do they still call it that?

Anyway, it is long with buttons from throat to nearly the floor but it also had slits up the side from nearly the floor to nearly the hips. I am not Elizabeth Hurley.

On the previous occasion, I had worn it with jeans and rather liked that jeans-with-posh look but even I know that jeans at a black tie occasion at an Oxford College celebrating its bicentennial was probably a step too outrageous for me to carry off.

Never mind, I thought, as a speed-dash around the charity shops again failed to provide me with navy skinny trousers, we can get to Oxford in good time and I will find something there.

I guess you have an inkling where this is heading.

I could not find navy skinny trousers in Oxford for love nor money.

Well actually, in panic, I did find them, for (a lot of) money.

Suffice it to say, L K Bennett, not even in a sale.

And they are glorified leggings.

( Very, very good leggings and a delight to wear but even so, dear god, what a price shock to the person not used to paying more than £5.50 for a good-label item.

I am now wearing them at every possible opportunity. There’s that thing that if you wear them more often then each wear has cost you less, and eventually they feel like a bargain – I am not, dear reader, at that stage yet.)

That night, I put them on and my striking Mandarin collared ‘dress’ and went down to the pre-dinner drinks.

I did a head count to find fewer than ten other women in the room and not one was wearing anything different than you would wear to an office meeting with your immediate boss. I have dresses like that!

Was I gutted? well yes and no. I did feel the best dressed woman there – and though was wearing bloody expensive posh leggings I needn’t have bought, I also had a very stylish charity shop find on too – and I will bet no one else in that room could have said that.

There are times when I wonder

September 26, 2016 / aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There are times when I get fed up with Oxfam. Well, actually it is nothing to do with Oxfam, just the bookshop.

Today I put out a lovely collection of textile art books and thought that instead of working five or six shifts this week, I could use that time to reinvent myself as a textile craftsperson.

Instead of coming back from two weeks’ holiday and finding the place so full of books that you could hardly move – most of which dear reader, as you might know by now, went in a sack – I could do something delightfully creative and in my own time.

But it is not going to happen.

Firstly, I need structure and left to my own devices, I would fiddle about with time week after week, after week, until months had gone by and I would have nothing to show for it.

Secondly, I need contact with people and am rubbish at doing stuff on my own – I am not sure how many collective textile art beginners groups there are in Petersfield, but I am guessing not that many.

And I like my fellow volunteers and enjoy their company. The dog is great and the Best Beloved is great too, but they are not as good at being bossed around and they have their own stuff to do all day – sleep and write history, though the dog’s book is coming along very slowly she says.

Thirdly, I would really miss the books.

For all the sacks there are gems. For all the depressing piles of browned Dick Francis collections, collections of guides to the stately homes of England, all creased, and who wants to buy a second hand guide to Windsor Castle? – there is a delight.

At the moment, I have a collection of old books on nature – ‘Nature for Bright Boys’ for example. Dull boys presumably should go off and make model aircraft or something.

And there are books with bizzare subjects. Who would think you could make your own horse equipment or why you would want to do that. Does stacking wood the Norwegian way differ from the way you would stack it in Deepest Sussex – too late to find out as it sold ten minutes after I put it out.

A book on the children of the ‘Persian’ royal family – battered but worth a couple of hundred quid.

Books, with just really good titles.

Old knitting books with cover pictures of extremely glum-looking children – mind you considering what they are wearing, I am sympathetic.

So, I will – and dear reader you can no doubt see my martyred air – carry on juggling shifts and sacking books and making plans which I never get to carry out because there are too many books to sack and sort and price.

But in between all that, I will build a collection of old medical books, books which are so pristine we can sell them at Christmas as a gift that the receiver will never know is a second-hand book.

I will look up all the old annuals we have been given – some are worth something but most aren’t – and put them out with the Tintin books which sell like hot cakes.

I will build a collection of princess books around the wrought iron frog wearing a small crown – he sold so there must be a princess somewhere in Petersfield who is an optimist.

I will polish my halo and carry on, and secretly wonder if I would ever have made a textile artist.

thereluctanthousewife

life marooned in deepest sussex

charity shopping,