charity shopping,

The Visit

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We were told that our Oxfam shop was to be inspected by our area manager.

First off, I must say that she is a good woman who sees us (thankfully) as a very well-run shop and so, sensibly but a little exhaustingly, devotes her energies largely to shops that are having problems.

Occasionally she will turn up in Petersfield just to visit a shop that is fine, thank you very much, drink tea and just have a rest from sorting out problem stuff.

But anyway the rules are that we should, on a regular basis, cull books that don’t sell and ideally send them on to another shop for another chance.

Sadly, the last but one shop we were designated to send them on to closed. Then it was Bognor’s turn, but at risk of plagiarising a King George V,  Bognor is buggered. Or at least it is not taking our culled books any more.

Be warned dear reader, this is just the beginning of me explaining how we price books and run the shop so you can pick up a copy of Bedside Algebra (yes there is such a book – and we have it in stock) if you want something more riveting.

Anyway, the rules are that paperback novels should be culled every three weeks.

My great colleague Stella does that – and makes sure they are all in proper alphabetical order. And I mean proper order.

But that relies on having the stock to do it – and for the first time since I have been there, we are short on paperback fiction.

(So, by the way, if you live near Petersfield and have a lot of good quality paperbacks please bring them to us.)

The same three weeks lifespan, apparently, should be true of non-fiction, but really, give over. We just don’t have the stock.

But our area manager was due to visit us to make sure that everything was up to date, so we needed to make it easy for her to sign us off as being a shop that ‘does the right thing.’

At this point I should explain how this works:

Every book that comes into the shop has to be sorted – will it live or will it be put in a re-cycling sack? – what category should it be assigned to, will it fit onto the appropriate shelf upstairs before being brought down into the shop.

We have pricing guns that print the price and category. They are a bit old, hard to work and it took the manager being off ill for some time before I finally mastered how to re-load them with new rolls of labels.

It turns out that if you throw them across the room, they break easily and are a surprisingly expensive £50 to replace. It wasn’t me, but it could have been.

(Should you need to know, I can tell you each and every book category by heart. So, category 15 is for old and interesting and category 5 is hobbies and category 8 is travel – see what I mean.)

And then the week is put on in pencil. And that’s so that you can pick a book, any book, of a shelf and know how long it has been sitting there.

In an ideal world, you would have a culling regime and a small army of enthusiastic volunteers would take books off the shelf that had been there for too long (more than three weeks), and replace them with newly donated books, all checked, priced and sitting neatly on a shelf upstairs.

We don’t live in that world.

So, the point about putting the week in pencil is that if we want to leave a book to get another (rather more lengthy) chance, we can rub out the week and put another (later) week on it. (Should you be in the slightest interested we are currently on week 18.)

Because we are a) short of stock and b) short of people who do systematic culling, I decided to get every book in the shop re-labelled as week 16 – the week the area manager was due to visit.

I do realise that this is cheating. I do realise that the area manager is not stupid and she will know what is what. But also, I know that the rules don’t quite work if you end up with empty shelves. (I also know that our shop manager has to live by the rules so there are things it is better he doesn’t actively know about.)

Dragooning fellow volunteers into this plan, I had many a person armed with a rubber and a pencil to re-week for England.

Whoever had been putting the weeks on with a biro was soundly cursed – even though they may well have claimed that if culling was done properly, it wouldn’t need to be in pencil….. Yeah, whatever.

The shop looked really good. The day before the area manager was due , I got an extra shift out of one of my colleagues and, building on two weeks of work, we changed every front-facing book, re-did some books in the window (but knowing they were likely to sell quickly didn’t put them out until 4.30 so that they would be there when she arrived the following morning.)

I was on the till, he was upstairs rapidly clearing boxes of books – pricing them, tidying shelves, emptying bins, making sure we had chocolate biscuits – anything and everything to make the shop look Sunday Best.

Of course, dear reader, you will have guessed that an emergency came up and the area manager didn’t come.

I comfort myself with the notion that we are never one of her emergencies and the shop is now ready for us to manage the culling properly.

We now can go round systematically and cull based on the fact that week zero (or week 16) has been established – and more to the point, the only one of our volunteers who did proper culling in moving to Sheffield.

Of course, all of that relies on the good people of Petersfield having a clear out of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daphne Du Maurier and Brexit

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“Emma, who lives in Cornwall with her retired grandmother, a famous retired actress, wakes one morning to find that the world has apparently gone mad:

No post, no telephone, no radio, a warship in the bay and American soldiers advancing across the field towards the house.

The time is a few years in the future. England has withdrawn from the Common Market and, on the brink of bankruptcy, has decided that salvation lies in a union – political, military and economic – with the United States.

Theoretically, it is to be an equal partnership; but to some people it soon begins to look like a takeover bid.”

This is on the flyleaf of Rule Britannia, written by Daphne Du Maurier in 1972.

I had never seen this book before – but as you, dear reader, know by now, Oxfam is a Pandora’s box of surprises.

(Yesterday the box opened to reveal an inundation of books – just when Duncan, an Oxfam stalwart if ever there was one, and I thought we had the shop all sorted out – and they were mostly recycling-sack fillers.)

Back to Daphne.  As a (deflated) Bremainer, I am sure that we are living in the phoney war period and the real fall out will come over months and then years.

Yesterday, I was culling the Old and Interesting shelves and although we give them a longer chance than say, gardening, there comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and they have to go.

I picked up a book on the history of the Liberal Party in its early days and was about to throw it onto the reject pile, when I thought again – for the very pragmatic reason that I didn’t have enough alternatives to fill up the shelf.

Now, that book has been there for months but blow me down as they say, half an hour after I had moved it from one shelf to the one lower down, a woman bought it.

I asked her if she was a political historian and she said no but her daughter had done a masters in international politics and was now working in London.

Then she reduced her voice to a whisper and said, ‘ She was so angry about the Brexit vote that she joined the Liberal Party. She would have joined Labour but there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment.’

(Whilst social and mainstream media is full of stories about vile threats and angry denunciations of Remainers and Brexiteers alike, in Petersfield it seems, we reduce our voices to a whisper when talking politics.)

And that young , likely-to-be-on-the-receiving-end-of-the-bad-news-about-Brexit  womanis right, there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment and not likely to be one, or for that matter much in the way of a vigorous opposition party, for the foreseeable future.

So, with Trump dangerously likely to end up in the White House and the fallout of our referendum still to come, I am off to read what Daphne Du Maurier prophesied.

HartFest

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The Harting Festivities or HartFest as we on the committee have started to call it, being rather daringly modern, are over.

This, if you are not a resident of Deepest Sussex, is the day in the year when the village main street is blocked off and we have a village fayre ( as you can tell we are not all that daringly modern.)

I for my sins as they say, am in charge of the bookstall – and I want that name changed as well.

For, dear reader, this is not just a couple of trestle tables pushed together covered in dog-eared copies of Jeffrey Archers and endless variations of Aga sagas (this being Sussex), oh no this is much, much, more.

I won’t bore you with the full explanations of what you need to do to effectively run a HartFest ‘bookstall’ but suffice it to say you need to fill the event hall of the Legion Club with books – all in their topic categories, paperback novels in alphabetical groups so that yes, we can tell the small, frail customer where to search for her Nora James.

Filling, in this context meant about 110 banana boxes of books and if you are just about to think, ‘Well, OK, that is quite a few but let’s not go overboard on the numbers here,’ I would like to say to you, ‘ a) you try lifting that many books from where they are sorted to where they have to be – yes round the corner but still…and b) because, yes indeed, they are sorted that means we also took 10 car loads of rejects to the tip and that is hard work too.

Before I wallow in too much halo-polishing, I would like to say of course I don’t do this alone.

I don’t do it alone because I am rubbish at doing anything on my own and always want a group of people to be involved in anything I am, but also to do it alone would  take months and render me unable to do anything else all year.

So, a marvellous group of people helped sort, moved the books and ran the bookstall on the day and lest this turn into a badly written piece for the parish magazine thanking everyone all over the place, I will leave it at that.

But, I do think we need to call it something bigger than a bookstall.

Pop-Up Bookshop, maybe. HartFest’s Mini-Hay, maybe. Any bright ideas are welcome.

So, all this hard work pays off – this year we made £962 and half goes to village charities and half to Oxfam ( who, between you and I ‘donate’ quite a lot of good quality books.)

I am not a competitive person but snapping at my heels is the necklace stall.

The idea came from a great woman in the village who thrown herself into village life with gusto (and thank the lord, relative youth.)

The idea is that most women have necklaces they have bought, don’t wear and don’t want – but some other woman will.

We, on the HartFest Committee were asked to see what we could raise in terms of necklaces through friends etc etc.

I showed myself to be the archetypal Sussex housewife by approaching my Pilates teacher to see if I could put a notice in her studio, my hairdresser for a notice in her salon, my book group and a group of friends who regularly lunch to salute one of our brilliant friends who has died.

Well, dear reader, sneery though I may be of my housewife credentials, they did good and we got lots and lots and lots of jewellery.

The sign I made for my hairdresser said:
Do you have any necklaces you don’t wear – of course you do!
So, if you could have a clear out of those beads you bought in the Accessorize sale and have ever worn since… Please think of us.
And we will take bracelets too – infact any old sparklies.

Rosie, my hairdresser reported that one of her clients had said to her,’ Oh I’d love to help, I have loads of necklaces I don’t wear but I don’t think any of them came from the Accessorize sale…’

Perhaps it was her who donated the sapphire and diamond ring. This is Deepest Sussex as I keep reminding you.

Anyway, I had nothing to do with the stall except for collecting carrier bags full of necklaces from my ‘sources’ but those who did, made a fantastic display of colour co-ordinated necklaces, silver ones polished to glint in the sunshine ( it was nearly sunny), an old birdcage draped with lovely sparklies – lovely all round.

And this, their first year, they made more than £500. And I have to say, a little disgruntedly, I am a woman who loves jewellery, and necklaces are a shed load easier to store and move than books.

Dear reader, I am in the wrong HartFest job.

Kites,Crows,Owls and Oxfam

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Well if it isn’t lambs it is birds as they might say in Deepest Sussex – if we knew anyone who was actually originated from Deepest Sussex.

We have a pair of kites living round here – no longer as rare as they were – but still a delight to watch soaring and sweeping around the back field.

They are not, in case you are not familiar with kites, small birds. Indeed the dog can look quite anxious and prey-like in certain lights.

But it is interesting to watch the corvids/crows/ravens mob them.

I should be more accurate on what type of corvids they are being a big fan of the book by Mark Cocker called ‘Crow Country.’

Amongst other fascinating stuff about corvids, It tells of the difference between crows and other corvids and explains that saying ‘if your see some ravens they are crows and if you see one crow it is a raven’ – or perhaps it is the other way round …..no, actually crows are sociable.

Anyway, these big kites are circling around looking for prey and out of the woods come the corvids and mob them – swooping around and chasing them off so the ‘poor’ kites heads off for the Downs.

The corvids are half the size of the kites but are quite determined and the kites seem either to be saying, ‘Bloody hell, is it harassment or what?’ or ‘Darling, shall we swoop up to the Downs and circle lazily round there and leave these rather plebeian types to their own thing?’

Whilst on the subject of predators, there is, what I think, is an owl box on one of our trees.

When I say ‘our’, I just mean trees we think of as ours in that they are on our horizon and are the two trees on the top of this blog – of course in fact, they are our landowner’s.

I am sure he knows what he is doing, and maybe the owls like a clear view of the catchment as it were – certainly it is not disguised or protected in any way and, as we say when one of us is washing up, ‘ don’t you think darling, it spoils the look of the tree?’

Remind me to tell you one day of the expensive bird box we put up which had been assiduously ignored by our birds who have then built their nests – insultingly – in the foliage alongside it.

Anyway, the Oxfam bookshop was open on Good Friday only from 10 till 3 so it was short shifts all round -and Joan was on the till in the morning, and I was on in the afternoon.

I had found a lovely book dating from 1941 which was sketches of children and although it was only worth about £3, I thought it was lovely enough to try it at £9.99.

Now Joan and I have a habit of me setting her a book-selling challenge on her shift. A big old bible ( but we had sold those before Easter), a Complete History of Fishing etc etc.

Essentially books I can’t find a place for anywhere else – I leave them on the counter and challenge Joan to sell them.

She looked at the book and although not usually a bibliophile, she was enchanted. That made me up the price to £12.99, and set her the challenge to sell it whilst I was out doing some errands.

In our cabinet – for expensive books (and vinyl as we now call records), was a set of three books called The Birds of Sussex.

(Should there ever be an avid reader of this blog with a good memory, they might recall than I found two of the the three volumes, which of course means they are worth a lot less, and then discovered the third volume under a pile of other stuff.)

Anyway, these books with gorgeous illustrations and I do mean gorgeous, had been in the cabinet for months and months. I was occasionally thinking of culling them and buying them to take home as they are so gorgeous – did I mention before how lovely they were ?

Anyway, (again) I got back from my errands, to find Joan in a high humour.

She had sold the book of children’s sketches – and sold The Birds of Sussex for a princely £100.

Because we were having a short day, I suggested we did not need to cash up once at lunchtime and then again at the end of the day as we usually do, but instead we could carry on through.

‘Oh not on your life,’ said Joan. ‘I am going to get the reading for this shift. You, Lucy, can eat my dust.’

And indeed I did.

I had a nice short shift with good weather and a holiday mood making customers smiley and generous, but no Sussex Birds for me.

Mutton and Lamb

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I may have mentioned that I am a charity shopper, and I may have mentioned that this has been acerbated by losing some weight ( not enough, but quite a bit.)

I may also have mentioned that Petersfield has a great selection of charity shops and I am practiced in a CSI-type fingertip search of them on a regular basis.

Surely, by now, anyone who is interested in this field of exploration will be au fait with the rules:

Don’t go looking for anything in particular – you can guarantee if you want a denim skirt, there won’t be one and in your rush to try and find one, you will miss the delightful duck-egg blue leather coat for £15 – and of course, dear reader, I did buy it.

If you can, think about altering the delightful find to fit or be jazzed up – I can’t do that so have to settle for what I can find/fit into.

Don’t buy cheap makes – look for the good stuff and so get quality materials cut, design etc. I have a wardrobe which has fistfuls of good makes in it, and all for a fraction of the price.

(And Oxfam has a great project in Senegal. The Senegalese are also onto the case – they would rather buy good quality second hand stuff than new cheap, shoddy stuff from China. Go online and see Frip Ethique. It is amazing.)

But there is another rule for people like me.

Don’t do mutton dressed as lamb.

It is a phrase taught me by my mother, and indeed grandmother, and one I have to mention now and then to close friends of a similar age.

Just because it is a great make and just because it fits you, it doesn’t mean you should be seen out wearing it.

The Germans have one of those compound words which translates roughly as 20 years old from behind, 70 from the front.

Even if you have the figure to wear mini-shorts with – and they were/are in fashion – black tights underneath, you really have to think about whether they are going to look like good, or very bad news, on you.

That being said, I do avoid elasticated trousers ( or slacks as my aunt would call them) whatever the make.

I do avoid any shoes with those heels/soles made of that compound which is supposed to look rather cork like….

There is mutton, and there is chic mutton.

My best friend has recently said she will give up on white jeans – but that will be the day.

I will have difficulty in giving up short, straight skirts with thick tights and jumpers – my style when Love Story set the fashion tone for young women, as I then was.

So, for all the vintage Jaeger jackets I have, for all the times my best beloved tells me I look very chic, there will be those times when I am walking around Petersfield looking rather too lamb than mutton.