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Unearthed Treasures

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All gold mines must run out in the end, but we have still got some nuggets found in the dusty nooks and corners of the Oxfam shop’s upstairs rooms.

I could go on about how much this massive clear out is affecting us volunteers – who would have previously heard the sound of hoovering on a Wednesday afternoon? Who would have thought people would been keen to clean down the benches on a Friday afternoon or taken some mugs home to go through the dishwasher – and indeed who would have expected someone to say they were going to source a cafetière to make coffee a more palatable option……?

We mice are on a roll.

Now, to the uninitiated the back rooms of the shop would still look a chaotic mess, but to those of us who have been initiated it looks organised, tidy, under control, managed, purposeful  – and hoovered.

But enough of that, this is about more unearthed treasures.

We have amongst our number, a philatelist and when I unearthed a box of stamps and stamp albums, he was on my speed dial.

He took them home and I heard nothing more about it – though I did find a returned bag of worthless stamps which are now with out decoupage artist. I mentioned her before in case you need to back-track a couple of blogs.

Anyway, today he came in for a shift on the till. I was a bit (just a bit) cock-a-hoop because we have taken £600 on Tuesday and Wednesday (combined, let’s not get carried away) so it means we are again well on (my) target to get more than £1,000 for the week. 

But the takings for this morning were only £86, and I was a bit downbeat. 

‘I have got the money I have raised from selling those other stamps and it will go in the till this afternoon,’ he said.

I decided to wait until tomorrow to see the final total for today, so told him not to tell me how much.

I am pretty sure he thinks I am an idiot, or at the very least and most polite, suffering from a  bout of bizarre behaviour but I am going to wake up tomorrow with a small buzz of anticipation.

So the unearthed stamps have done their job.

Meanwhile as they say, I also unearthed four boxes of old and dated cameras. This is one of them (now dusted.)

And by unearthed, I mean some were under a bench behind yet another box of padded envelopes ( we could create a whole extensive ward of padded cells if needed), more under another bench behind three boxes of clarinet music….

Anyway, another volunteer does corporate filming and so knows his way around cameras.

He also knows about lighting so has fixed the lamps used for photographing the clothes we put online and has sourced some new special bulbs which had previously been declared as ‘too expensive’ to buy – they are £12 each. 

I have ordered two. Yes, me on no authority except that when we are taking £1400 a week, it makes sense to pay £24 to get the photos looking good. And yes, I am an unrepentant mouse.

So, back to the cameras.

He looked them over and knew what he was talking about.

Most were just those small cameras we all had for holiday snaps and are worthless, but some are lovely delights and some are worth putting on the internet.

The ones going in the shop are more attractive artefacts than anything a photographer would want to use, but when they are this lovely who cares?

I think this is a Kodak Junior?

So, we are doing a window on photography with books and the worthless camera stuff, and a table with the pretty delights we can sell. It is not done yet so if you want photos you will have to settle for these for now.

The cine camera works and has its own leather case and is yours for about £25…..

Meanwhile, under a previously mentioned stack of chairs, I found a sealed cardboard box – either never opened or opened and re-taped up.

Either way, inside was a whole collection of the postcards of first day stamp covers.

They are all pristine and absolutely lovely.

We have them out for sale at 5 for £1 and I think that maybe too cheap but hey ho, they will make money for Oxfam which they certainly were not going to do in a sealed cardboard box, under some chairs, upstairs.

When I was trying to corral all the padded envelopes – and do you know I found some in the electricity meter cupboard the other day – I wanted to put them on the top of some shelving.

We use padded envelopes to send out stuff bought online – but not by the box load, so they needed to be labelled, easily found and stored out of the way. Simples you’d have thought….

On the aforementioned top of the shelving, it turned out there were about 20 Oxfam produced cookery books.

They were published in 2010 so part of our new stock for that year, and maybe 2011. And probably not since.

So they could have been up there for a decade…..

But they were fine – if a little dusty – and though their barcode didn’t register on the till, we did not let that deter us.

I put them out on a bench and left a note to offer them to volunteers – a small thank you for all they have been doing – include hoovering.

When everyone who wanted one had taken one, we priced the rest and put them out for sale. They have sold.

Putting The Pieces Together

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This is a blog I wrote in November 2019 and apparently forgot to post.If you are interested in books, it will keep you going until more news of what is happening at the moment. It is not a bad read – though I say it myself and might well be wrong….

I have before complained about someone buying the very artefact I have built an Oxfam display around.

I know I have to sell it, but sometimes I wish that art gallery practice of just putting a red dot on it until we are ready to dismantle the display could operate – perhaps it could but I have never quite had the nerve.

This week artefact ‘stealing’ happened twice on one day.

Yes, really.

The table was, of course, a display of war and poppies. And recently someone donated a picture frame with a photo of a soldier, a notice of his bravery at Basra in 1917 and a very faded ( you would need a magnifying glass and patience to read it) letter presumably relating to what he had done.

I had piled up books and this picture on the table ready to arrange them into a display and gone out to go to get some milk.

Now, it is a rule that for Oxfam bookshop customers, there is nothing on the carefully arranged shelves as interesting as a haphazard, not yet displayed pile of books and stuff.

So, I was not entirely surprised when I came back to find my brilliant and unflappable colleague reporting that someone wanted to buy the ‘picture.’

Upstairs another good colleague was rootling around on Google to try and find mention of this soldier and therefore any idea if he was a little bit famous.

But nothing – no wikipedia, nothing except a mention in the London Gazette.

We did realise that to anyone from his family doing ancestor research, this would be a valuable item but tracking him down and then members of his extended family doing research would take a lot of time – time we don’t have lying around.

And, there is a bird in the hand argument.

So I went downstairs to talk to my colleague who had the customer’s number and my Best Beloved had called in, and was looking at the image.

Between us, we decided it was not a lot of monetary value but we would try say £9.99 and settle for £5.99 if haggled into it.

But my unflappable and brilliant colleague called him up and ignoring the collective ‘wisdom’, told the customer he could have it as the special price of £15. 

Ten minutes later he had called and collected it.

That afternoon, I was discussing the next window display with a good colleague.

Since our special window display person is currently indisposed, the role has fallen to me – this, it turns out was not a role I had to fight off all comers to take on.

Anyway, trying to maintain her high standards is proving a challenge and the current window was a good idea but not a success.

My colleague suggested using a small table with a half done jigsaw on it and lots of more puzzles on the wall along with puzzle books.

That reminded me that I had an old jigsaw on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be looked at, and how nice would that be half done with its wooden box propped up.

This was a puzzle with the counties of England and Wales on one side and the kings and queens of England on the other ( up to Edward VII if you are interested.)

I took to it my afternoon colleague on the till and asked if he would put it together to see if we had all the pieces.

The pieces were all in the shape of the counties so apart from the straight edges, none of the pieces were traditional jigsaw shapes.

I left him to it and then, needing some rubber gloves to clean silver, more on that some other time, I nipped out.

As I was leaving the shop, a couple of customers were talking to my colleague about the jigsaw.

When I got back, he had finished and all the pieces were there.

The customers had gone, but one of them had asked that when we found out how much it was worth, could he have first refusal.

So, again, I was upstairs Googling about to try and find out the price.

There was one which was the Scotland equivalent and someone was asking £600 for it but I did not think that was going to be realistic.

There was another on ebay for £40 but it had pieces missing – bound to severely affect the price.

Then I found an auction site which was willing to reveal the hammer price. Now, it was a lot with other things involved so I did some calculations and discussed it with my jigsaw-doing colleague and we thought £100.

But, inspired by my morning colleague’s efforts, I called the customer and said, ‘£150.’

He said, ‘£100.’

I said, ‘Cut the difference and £130’

He said, ‘I’ll be round in three minutes.’

And he was.

Of course, the displays will go on but sometimes its a shame not to have the A list stars on show.

Titivating

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The bread and butter of an Oxfam bookshop is re-stocking, refreshing, making look good, making the shop look cared for  – and that involves culling/rejecting/sending books to a central warehouse where they might get another life- chance.

( I am sorry if you are wincing at this point, but we have to be ruthless in our standards if we want to be a quality second-hand bookshop that happens to be raising money for very good causes.)

This is the result of the alarmingly many donations on Saturday – yes just one day – again I am sorry but we do have to do it.

Anyway, the word of last week was titivating.

I was surprised that some of our volunteers didn’t know that word, but one fellow (young) volunteer looked it up and said, ‘Ah now I understand.’

Oxford English Dictionary says: ’titivate something – to improve the appearance of something by making small changes.’

So, once you have done the ruthless bit of culling books, you have to look around the shop and titivate it.

For example, do you know what a front-facer is? Of course you don’t, why would you? but once I have explained it, it will be obvious.

It is a book (on a stand) which had its cover facing you. You might be surprised to know how many of them sell compared to books which only show you their spine. 

Have a look when you are next in a bookshop – they will all have them.

So, front-facers need to look good, and then they sell and then you need to find another one which looks as good – and repeat.

Shelves need to look full. Half empty shelves never sell – they look too sad and tired.

So, you have to fill up shelves and that means having stock to fill them with. 

Given that we can’t order our stock, that can mean juggling.

We were short of history – which we never usually are – but we were.

So, we moved a shelf of Folio Society books and used them to fill a shelf and used the history books on that shelf to ‘fatten’ up the shelves above.

When we get more history, we will move the Folios again.

But you can’t just fill up any shelf with what you have lots of. You can’t put ‘humour’ or ‘self help’ under history – not really….

And whilst I am on the subject of history, let me tell you about some treats of books which are now for sale on the internet.

One small book and three weighty tomes.

The small book is a ‘finger book’ and was given to young men going off to WW1 by, I am told, by godparents and was designed to be slipped into a uniform pocket.

I have no idea what story this little book has to tell, but it is a lovely, and possibly, sad thing.

And, if that book could tell a story, these books actually do.

They are a glimpse of the social history of Portsmouth.

They are the record of the council’s deliberations and decisions in 1913,1914 and 1918 – not least the Education and Distress Committees.

It is the index which gives you an insight into the attitudes and decisions of the policy/rules makers of the time.

I will leave you with some images of that.

But just before I go, I will tell you that the result of all of us titivating, we took £1411.10 last week – we are very ‘chuffed’ which according to the Collins dictionary is ‘pleased, delighted, gratified, etc.’ And we are.

and some more

Councillor Windibank?

More Clearing Out And Some Delights Too

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So, we are on a roll in Oxfam and there is lots to tell you, dear reader. ( If this makes no sense, I’m sorry but you will have to refer to the previous post.)

We have been busy clearing out – and under sorting benches, behind stacks of chairs (as previously mentioned), in nooks, crannies and corners, on the top of other stuff, under other stuff, in the store room – all covered in dust.

In plastic crates, in sagging cardboard boxes, in mysterious packaging, we have found stuff.

Miss Haversham eat your dusty heart out. Our two hoovers have been busy.

(Mind you before we get to the delights let me tell you that most of what was found was in the re-cycle bin before you could say, well, pretty much anything.

Oxfam promotions from last Christmas, two boxes of leaflets from a campaign in 2016, cookery books published by Oxfam in 2010 – mind you we put some of those out in the shop and offered the rest to volunteers as a small thank you for their work, especially at the moment.

Meanwhile, so far we have had three volunteers doing tip runs.)

But, some of the stuff is a delight and worth good money, but more of that later.

Well, go on then, enough of the clearing out, let’s do some of the delights now.

So, you know (from the previous blog) we have unearthed two boxes of old postcards.

One of our creative volunteers suggested – as they are not valuable – they could be made into decoupage panels to hang either side of our corner cabinet.

(Now we have only got that out in the shop rather than being permanently, shop manager-banished, to the cobwebbed corridor behind the scenes because the lovely area manager said – ‘Yes, let’s get it out and use it.’ Which we did.)

So, I put a call out on our village/hamlet WhatsApp group and asked if anyone knew anyone who did decoupage.

Of course they did – just like they did when I needed a skull for a Shakespeare display…..

So, we have a decoupage artist (and her artist-group friends, I gather) designing and making panels and our old (worthless) stamps, postcards, bits of stuff found in old books, old magazines, and and… will be transformed and I promise a photo when it is done.

OK, more delights?

Oxfam does good and popular cards but like all retail merchandising, we have old lines which are retired and new lines which come in.

There was a box of discontinued lines in the stock room and one of our volunteers said she had asked to put them out as their barcode still registered on the till, so they were saleable and they were heavily discounted – a bargain indeed.

She had been told she couldn’t as they had to wait to be returned to Oxfam for pulping but when we asked the the lovely area manager (for future reference, LAM) she said, ‘Why not. Let’s see what happens.’

We did, and our sales for Oxfam-produced goods went from about £50 the previous week to £200 the next week.

Now, I am pretty sure Oxfam would rather have the money than the cards to pulp….. I am not sure what £100 does in Yemen but I would bet it feeds a few children.

Enough of delights, or one more?

There are a few to chose from so you might find others in later instalments.

We have traditionally/always/in the teeth of good evidence/said this is too high a price point/  priced our CDs and DVDs at £2.99.

We, that is the two main CD and DVD volunteers, have lobbied for three years to have the price reduced. A combination of Spotify and Netflix etc meant our sales were falling. 

We did a survey of every charity shop in Petersfield, Chichester and Winchester and visits to any Oxfam shop we cam across on our travels came up with a comprehensive/irrefutable argument to reduce the price to £1.00.

The answer was no. Repeatedly no. The argument was you would need to sell three CDs at £1.00 to get the equivalent of one sale at £2.99. And anyway, it was Oxfam policy and therefore could not be changed.

That only works if indeed you do sell one at £2.99.

So, we asked the LAM if we could do the £1.00 pricing thing and she said, ‘Yes, of course.There is no central policy on pricing of CDs and DVDs’

So we did.

We have never sold as many CDs and DVDs as we have in the last few weeks.

We were endlessly re-filling the racks.

Yesterday, when I was on the till, a man bought 14 CDs and was chatting about how great it was to add to his collection. I asked if he would have bought them at £2.99 and he said he would have bought two of them.

He asked me to round up his ‘bill’ to £20 so I did.

( We made £268 yesterday which for many city Oxfam shops is nothing, but for a shop in a market town which was making about £100 per day, this is good news.)

Which leaves me with the the tantalising ‘promise’ another blog about unearthed really special old bellows cameras, some lovely old books from the 1700s and early 1800s, plans for Christmas and more….

Meanwhile can I tell you that for the last three weeks (and hopefully for weeks to come) we have made more than £1,000. It may not impress you but for us volunteers it is pretty impressive given that the shop was taking £600 – £700 a week. 

Yes we as a society have opened up which no doubt has helped sales, and yes takings fluctuate but on your behalf I would like at ask the amazing volunteer group who are keeping the shop not just afloat but sailing with a lovely breeze behind them, to take a bow.

A therapeutic clear out

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I am back in Oxfam (temporarily) and it is lovely – filling an Oxfam-shaped hole in my life – and below are some of the reasons why.

Now, I am a probably a bit over-excited so the list will be a long read, actually several long reads, so might put off all but the most hardened readers. 

(And there are no interesting photos but there will be in the next post, promise.)

Please don’t worry if you are not that hardened, I will never know that you went off to take up knitting.

So, the shop was looking rather thin, tired and sad.

Upstairs, there were crates of unlooked-at old books because no one had checked their value and put them out or online, the shelves were stuffed but chaotic, there was stuff /rubbish everywhere – stashed down the side of lockers, on the high shelves, under  stacks of chairs, under sorting benches, on the high tops of shelves, down the sides of cupboards, and and …..

We had alway known that, but with the agreement of the amazing new area manager, more of her in later instalments, we could clear out – and I mean really clear out.

Meanwhile donations had been turned away because those that were there, were not being sorted and shelved – and you can’t do that because who knows what value that turned away donation would have had.

And the takings were down to about £700 to £850 with weeks when only £600-something was the order of the day.

Now, of course, there were the pandemic and lockdowns to consider – and with the new ‘freedoms’ (don’t get me started on the handling of all this) bookshop life is easier – but even so….

This is only the pre-amble so again, you might want to heave a sigh and turn away. But if you stick with me there is a the (temporary) happy ending.

The shop is now looking fat, sleek and refreshed and last week we took more than £1200.

I will come back to that fattening later, but for now, upstairs – the behind-the-scenes work.

The shop manager is a hoarder and while the cat is away us mice have been having a therapeutic clear out.

We found whilst clearing/cleaning out for example ( not an exhaustive list by any means) :

Four irons and two ironing boards – we are a bookshop. 

We do indeed sell clothes online but our amazing online-clothes person takes them home to wash and iron, and even if she didn’t, we wouldn’t need four irons and two ironing boards. Even clothes shops have steamers, not irons, so goodness knows how long they have been stuffed down the side of those lockers.

Size cubes dating from 2004 – we know that because 2004 was the year of the Boxing Day Tsunami and that was the year we turned into a bookshop. 

Size cubes in case you are wondering, are those little bits of plastic that are on coat hangers to tell you that something is size 10 (I wish I was looking at those), 12, 14, 16 or XL or whatever. They are now on their way to an Oxfam clothes shop.

Three till drawers for tills that no longer exist in Oxfam, they are in the re-cycling bin.

Left-over red nose stuff from 2017 – apparently you need to take those back to Sainsbury’s and are in my car boot ready to do just that.

A broken hoover – we have two working others.

It has gone to the local tip thanks to a volunteer 

And another volunteer is taking one of the ironing boards – the one with no cover and just, just in case we need an ironing board in a bookshop, we kept one.

She has also taken a box of old postcards to be valued by a local auction house.

That box was on a shelf she decided to have a look at. 

They had been there as long as she could remember. They had been ignored for say, oh I don’t know, several years. Certainly all the eight years I had been working there and thought it was a box of official Oxfam paperwork – after all it was on that shelf.

Two large and heavy boxes of foreign coins – we can send them to be re-used in some way but have yet to find out where and how – but I should point out, we are volunteers holding the fort and this is not top of our list. Anyone who has any ideas, please let me know.

Five boxes of mobile phones – now we know there was an Oxfam contract to re-cycle these and I learned that all the gold medals at this year’s Olympics we made from gold from old mobile phones.

And they had been sitting there for say, let’s say accumulating, for several years. 

At the moment, there is a hiatus I understand, between contracts, so they are sorted, boxed up, properly stored and ready to go when we know where they need to go.

There is a stack of chairs for shop meetings that never happen –  we don’t have shop meetings because they ‘are a waste of time’ so when on a whim, I decided to pull them out and hoover – we still have two – I discovered another box full of old postcards in amongst the deep, deep dust and rather surprisingly, another box of light bulbs – we have about 40 of them found in nooks and corners and now in one place.

They, the postcards not the light bulbs, will be part of a lovely display on the newly installed display table.

So, that is enough for now but stayed tuned for how we mice have in the words of our new area manager – and there will be more about her – have started ‘breathing and making the shop sing.’

Eating Out

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Whist we could not make it to Northern Majorca this month ( again – and yes I know this is a rich person’s whinge), we have made it lovely West Wales.

Well, it is lovely but it is also cold with a very brisk northerly ‘breeze’ as the weatherman called it, and not much in the way of sun.

Still and all, it is somewhere other than home, and it came with a promise.

I had promised myself and the Best Beloved had also promised, that we would eat out – no cooking for me and the chance to have our first meals out since before Christmas.

So, not being a great researcher, I had pottered around on the internet looking for good places to eat on the locality, and thought I would leave the fine tuning of my potential choices until we got to our rented cottage and read the inevitable visitors’ book – that which always tells you where to go and where to avoid.

Ah well, the visitors book was scrapped as a Covid measure.

And the wifi connection in this part of very rural West Wales is pretty rubbish. After half an hour of one/off connection, I discovered that St Davids is not a place of culinary excellence. 

There are a couple of highlights but the BB balked at the innovative Grub Kitchen where you eat the insects bred by the chef’s wife in her ‘grub’ farm – he was not further enamoured by the news you can also visit it and see what you are about to eat before it is mashed, fried, griddled etc. 

I would have gone for it as I remember fondly the salty crunchiness of deep fried crickets in Thailand many moons ago.

He said he would go with me but be very, very careful about what he chose off the menu. And would probably stick to a beer.

The one posh place in St David’s doesn’t allow dogs and the cottage owners don’t allow you to leave them alone in the place, so that was out.

Anyway, I had found Mrs Will The Fish which is apparently an unassuming bungalow in Solva where you can pre-order and collect a platter of locally caught fish and shellfish, so that is hopefully happening tomorrow.

But today we decided to have a late lunch in one of the local pubs which I gathered after half an hour of waiting for reviews to come up on my weary, wifi-deprived laptop, did good food and was popular.

We booked for 2pm, went in and were seated and they were happy to have the dog along, so all looked good.

I went for the mussels – but the mussels were off.

Then what I really wanted was one of those orders that Americans do.

‘Please can I have a small size greek salad, not a main size, alongside a starter possibly the duck or maybe the potted pork what do you recommend? Both at the same time you understand, and a small side order of chips?’

The BB said he was having a burger. I watched the service and the harassed and no doubt short-staffed comings and goings and decided I too would have a burger but without the bread.

Not too complicated/American a request but it threw the waitress – her revenge would come later.

Meanwhile and I have to say, it had been a long meanwhile so far, a couple sat down next to us.

They had walked 6 miles of the Coastal Path and were looking forward to a justified late lunch.

‘Food service has been suspended,’ they were told by the waitress.

‘Until when?’ they asked.

‘What time is it?’

‘2.30’

‘Oh, then we have stopped serving.’

They had to settle for crisps and peanuts and by that time, I was beginning to envy them. 

They finished their snacks, and a couple of lagers and set out to find a bus back before our waitress appeared again.

‘Sorry she said, you burgers got dropped so there will be a delay so they can cook them again.’

Yes it was the same waitress who was less than impressed by the idea of a burger without bread, ‘You mean all the stuff but not in a burger. No bun??’

I was, at that point very glad, I had not asked for anything more complicated.

Any by ‘got dropped’ she later admitted she had dropped them……

They were good homemade burgers, and indeed grit free, and the chips were excellent – mine arrived in a bun as it is clearly beyond comprehension that a burger doesn’t belong in a bun. And I get that up to a point – a scotch egg without the egg… but anyway.

And though the more than generous helpings it meant there was no need for supper, I was somewhat at a loss about what to do come early evening and got rather nostalgic about the night before when I had rustled up crushed Pembrokeshire new potatoes with mint butter, asparagus and some thick cut local ham with background Radio 4.

This eating out business might be a bit over-rated.

So, I think I am planning to save my BB’s promise tokens for eating out – much like the old green shield stamps – until I can book a place which will serve food I really enjoy and could/would never cook at home.

And, tomorrow there is Mrs Will The Fish eaten at ‘home.’ Fish fingers crossed.

Maxine Peake and Pies

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This, dear reader, is a rambling story which takes in a Mike Leigh film, pie-making, a waste of a day, a trip to a flea market, and it ends in disaster.

So if none of that takes your fancy, feel free to leave now.

So, one rainy day in the winter lockdown, we decided to watch Mike Leigh’s film, Peterloo. 

Maxine Peake was the indomitable mother figure and she made pies for a living.

Cut to the Kempton Antiques Market – really a large flea market.

I used to go there with a good friend and one day I bought an artisan wooden mallet type thing which I thought was probably used by a someone chipping marble or wood and which I thought would be useful to bash against my hammer to get out tacks when I was dismantling a chair ready for re-upholstering.

(Actually, it was rubbish at that, but I liked it anyway.)

Cut back to Peterloo and the family is sitting around talking politics or something because I have to say during that shot, I had stopped listening.

I saw my artisan piece of equipment behind Maxine Peake.

Putting two and two together, I realised my artisan equipment had something to do with pies and went on a search to find out what it was.

I even tracked down the name of the set director who is the imaginatively named Charlotte Dirickx. I thought I would contact her and find out about this obscure 19th century cooking implement.

I didn’t need to.

I was telling the story so far to a dog-walking friend when she said, ‘Oh it’s a pie dolly for making hot water crust pies.’

Indeed, it seemed, it was.

Now, I know that Mike Leigh has this thing about authenticity so I thought, well if Maxine Peake can make a pie with one, I can too.

Now, I like a pie and often make a pie with my grandmother-taught shortcrust pastry skills. Indeed we had a cheese, onion and dill one last night.

And here as they say are two I had made earlier though I have to say, I didn’t make my own puff pastry – life is indeed too short.

But I hadn’t done hot water crust for a while so it was a bit of a challenge during what was a driech and drear, lethargy-inducing lockdown day.

I am sure Maxine’s character didn’t make her pies with best butcher’s meat – and indeed a Manchester pie is basically potatoes and a bit of butter in a pie.

But I did. 

So I made the beef filling – as I said good quality beef, bay leaves, red wine, carrots, celery, nice stock – but not too much because it had to support the pastry. 

And I made the hot water pastry and moulded it around my pie dolly, filled the insides, put a lid on it and put it in the oven.

I can freely admit at this point that it was a faff and the pie dolly is not going to become a favourite kitchen implement.

And you can see why.

A good few hours of wasted effort on a failed experiment.

The Best Beloved said he was fine with eating a collapsed pie and the pastry was lovely, but the filling was a bit dry. I mean, really?

Crypto – but not a currency

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Years, actually many years ago, I worked in the water ‘industry’ –  how can water, essential to life, be an industry? But that is for another rant.

Anyway, as a result, I have been warning anyone who would listen, that any bright terrorist/mad person could cause a lot of damage easily by ‘polluting’ a drinking water supply.

I have to say that ‘anyone’ in this case is currently only the Best Beloved, but in times past, it has been people in the House of Commons bar, on a Leeds bus, a group of 100 PhDs, two chief executives of Yorkshire Water, an Offwat executive, and people around for supper.

Well, I feel vindicated as an attempt to hack into a Florida water supply was stopped only by an eagle-eyed water company employee.

Right, dear reader, you are welcome to think at this point that I have made my point and you can get on with your life. 

What is more this might not be the time you want to hear more about ‘surprise’ diseases caused by something which started in an animal and causes all sorts of issues for humans.

Feel free to escape to your knitting.

This is not a story of water-terrrosim but it is about a water-borne issue.

So, I was at one stage in life ( quite a well paid stage, I have to say,) a consultant for Yorkshire Water – and there was a drought.

I, along with my smart friend and lunch companion, asked the CEO what would happen if it didn’t rain. ‘It will,’ he said. It didn’t.

After he lost his job, the new CEO, asked me about this conversation and I said they should do a little bit of planning for the worst and hoping for the best. Cryptospordium, for example.

I bet you are sitting up now, a little bit excited to know about Cryptosporidium. Well, breathless reader, I will tell you.

It is a microscopic parasite and it causes diarrhoea and, wouldn’t you know it, a persistent cough.

It gets into the water system from animal faeces – now you need to think of sheep grazing near Yorkshire reservoirs.

So, for most people it is unpleasant, but for some, it can be a killer.

And, significantly, it does not get killed by usual water treatment.

So, I set up a two day crisis planning event for the management of Yorkshire Water.

They sat, a little reluctantly I may say, around a table and we fed them information we had created.

We told them, it is 6pm, and you have just had an alert that crypto has been found in the water system.

What you have to do with crypto is tell everyone to boil their water.

For that to happen you have to alert them – put something out on the 10.30 regional news for example.

But, watching that will be the chief executives of all the regional breweries who use a lot of unboiled water, hairdressers, hospital managers, people who run pub kitchens, well you can imagine the list.

They will want to know what is going on.

And what about all the people who hadn’t watched the late news and didn’t know they should boil their water before they took a glass of it to bed.

There will be a lot of people who did watch the news and will call the Yorkshire Water helpline – but everyone there has gone home. And anyway they are used to dealing with bill queries and leaks – what information will you need to get together so they can answer the questions they will be getting?

Because of the drought, YW had re-engineered the water system to get supplies all over the place but no one now has a map of where water goes.

And, you tell the rather shifty looking management team, they only test for crypto once every three days – so you could have a bit of a lag on your hands but no one knows for sure.

As they set about making decisions, we brought in their own section chiefs to explain why this or that could or couldn’t happen – and they had to work through changing scenarios.

I could tell you a lot more details but I suspect your interest might just wane a bit.

As a result of that exercise YW re-vamped all sorts of plans and procedures over the next two weeks, and a couple of weeks later than that, crypto was found on another water company’s patch. 

YW’s chief executive rang them and told them he was sending a team to help with the newly minted plans. It worked.

It wasn’t a worldwide pandemic threat but did serve to remind that those people who will have to deal with crises, should be forced to sit through a proper planning exercise. Just saying, Boris.

Squid and Friends

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Apparently, hearing is the last sense to leave the body. Well, for me the last activity to leave the Covid lethargy, is cooking.

No surprise there then for anyone who knows me.

Meanwhile, it takes days to actually get round to cleaning the kitchen floor, I have been dithering and dathering about which Coursera course to sign up for – even though they are free and only require a minimum of concentration…..

All those things I did in April, have not been done since. 

I have no pictures of my culinary disaster so here are a few winter pictures.

So this, dear reader, if you are still with me and not off to do something more interesting, is a story of squid and friends.

Squid is cheap, and is best if you cook for a few seconds or a really long time, or both. ( I am sure there are other such ingredients but none spring to mind – mind you, not much ‘springs’ to mind these days.)

The Best Beloved was not a squid fan when he met me – mind you he was not a Labour voter, good at buying jewellery, hoovering, putting the washing on, enjoying long lunches with friends.

I converted him to squid stew with various adaptations of a Hugh Fearnley-Wittingtstall recipe.

You make a tomato sauce – a good one – fry the squid for seconds and put in the sauce and then both of them on a long slow cook. (Bottom of the Aga for those of us who live in Deepest Sussex).

You can add potatoes and fennel an hour or so in. 

I have made this, with variations, loads of times and so it counts as easy, familiar, comfort, not meat, cheap, flexible, appreciated – and most importantly to this story, whilst you are doing something else.

So, all was in hand when I realised I was approaching the time for a family call and went into the oven to check the stew.

Well the squid was nicely meltingly ready, but the fennel (always a tricky ingredient) was a bit hard.

(Dear reader, I know this is going on rather long, but there will be a nicely uplifting bit about friends soon-ish.)

So, I decided to take out the squid and put the rest back in the oven, though this time in the top (hot) oven of the Aga and get on with the call.

Call took longer than I thought and so it was the charred remains of a tomato sauce I pulled  out of the oven. Inedible, no I mean it, not possible to rescue.

I had squid, and a memory.

My lovely sis had returned from living in Milan.

She had spent time with staying with my ex-boyfriend, and various other people and then pitched up in Leeds to stay with me for a week. 

(She is still in Yorkshire – some many years later.)

If you are lucky, there are times in your life when you have a special group of friends. You spend time together, you do things together, you get along brilliantly –  you are caught up in a delightful web of friendship.

It has happened to me three times in my life, and I celebrate each of them.

This time was in Leeds and my sis was a pivotal part of it.

And, among many other things she brought us group of friends, a recipe.

Squid and peas and pasta.

In my memory it was summer and there were back doors open, our friends drinking wine and gossiping around the kitchen table whilst my sis cooked her meal.

So, here in winter, and lockdown, I looked at my cooked squid. Got some peas. Melted some butter and cooked the peas in it. Swirled them with the squid and the clinging bits of non-ruined tomato sauce and added them to some cooked spaghetti – using, of course, a splash of the spaghetti cooking liquid to meld the sauce.

I have to say at this point, this was not my sis’s way of making the dish but hey ho, I did what I could under the circumstances.

My BB duly appreciated supper – but I was back in a house in Leeds with my amazing friends, laughing, letting dogs run round the garden, swapping journalistic stuff, discussing politics, hearing stories of life in Millan, music on in the background.

There were BBQs, there were loves lost and gained, there was a sunny summer, and that was that very special time.

And no we are not all still in contact, but at the time I was pretty convinced I was living a very good life – and indeed, dear reader, I was.

The Art Of Conversation

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When we were allowed, and it was my Best Beloved’s birthday, six of us had lunch together.

So, good friends invited us and erected (without, so they say, any martial discord) a sturdy  gazebo so we could all sit outside, be safe.

And just talk.

Chat, cut across one another with an anecdote, digress, suggest a good book read, rail at politicians, tease, compliment on the lovely food, tell stories, just relax with people we know very well, and laugh, all of it for hours – no ‘lunch party’ just good friends.

It was such a highlight – and was rather giddily exhausting.

It has been a long time since we did that. 

In our house in this nearly a year of more or less lockdown, there are no-need-to-finish sentences, chats about the dog’s welfare (always a topic of conversation), who is doing the washing, discussion about what to watch on tv with the inevitable ‘wasn’t he in that thing we watched, you know the one set in Northumbria with that woman who was in ……..,’ endless half conversations about how awful the government are, and more about Trump.

And, which small projects have to be done today – or tomorrow, or the next day.

(Today, for me it was pickling red cabbage and doing the ironing. For the BB it is a gentle start to podcasting his book, a very gentle start I have to say, and reading the beginning of a friend’s book.)

And it is not just us. I was talking to a neighbour on my dog walk this morning and she said she was getting to the point of not wanting to ring friends because she had nothing much to say – minding children, cleaning the kitchen floor, dog walking….

And another acquaintance who said it was so nice to chat to someone she didn’t know that well because it meant she made a ‘chatty effort.’

We have a Zoom call tonight – and yes they have fallen by the wayside from the early days when we would have several a week – and it means I will spend some time in the next couple of hours thinking of something, anything, interesting I can say.

(Leave alone the fact my hair is a mess after walking in rain and wind and whether I will try and make it look presentable, or just not bother.)

( And likewise with the ironing – do I really need to bother? I ironed a white linen shirt bought on our September trip to Italy – I think I might have mentioned that before – worn last I can’t remember when or why, or when or why I might wear it again….)

I wear either dog walking boots, or slippers. And it is jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper. I would say 80 per cent of my wardrobe is hanging there doing nothing. ( I have this fantasy that they get up in the wee small hours and make all kinds of interesting outfit combinations and sneak out for Covid-free meet ups with other people’s unused wardrobes.)

My dog walking friend called me today ( we haven’t met up since lockdown) and I suggested we talked and walked. We will each go on our own dog walk and we will talk on the phone as we do it.

(We will also arrange to swap her marmalade for my pickled red cabbage when I make one of my occasional trips to the ‘delights’ of Petersfield.)

So, please, dear reader, don’t tell me that you are discussing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with your re-ingnited group of university friends one of whom is now an interesting tech millionaire.

Or, you have set up a local poetry discussion group and you are exploring Blake’s oeuvre.

Or, you have surprised yourself by getting involved in an Instagram group advising on the best make-up for an older woman to make herself ‘feel good by looking good’.

Or, you find yourself soothed by chatting daily to your sourdough starter,

Please don’t.

Mind you Wittgenstein’s black swans stuff was always a good conversation starter at a party – my political philosophy degree must come in useful for something.