Books

Dilettante Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is the link the to his book

Just a snapshot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, back to Google to find another route.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cockroaches and Balls

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The other day seemed to be one of those when the strangest donations come to light in the Oxfam bookshop.

A lot of our donations are repetitive and can I say, just sometimes a little boring, but now and then you find something interesting and odd in many senses of the word.

I am sure there is a book about any and every subject out there somewhere and many seem to find a (hopefully, temporary) home in Deepest Sussex.

Before now, I have found a book on making your own horse-riding equipment and one on how to chop and stack wood the Norwegian way.

So, the other day I found a coffee table book on Anatolian Vernacular Architecture. Not a usual find and one that is, perhaps surprisingly, worth a bit and now is listed, should your heart be beating a little faster, on Oxfam Online.

And then I came across a collection of old Spurs books. I am not a football fan but I was rather taken with the delightful History of Tottenham Hotspur FC 1882 – 1946. Spurs was referred to as the Hotspur Athletic Club – how charming is that?

And then, my cup runneth over when I found this:

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Now isn’t that splendid?

And if that wasn’t enough, I found this book which was the answer any anyone’s Christmas book present dilemma. It is the book, I thought, that anyone would want in their stocking. This is it:

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I tweeted to that effect and it got a few likes and re-tweeted gently around the Oxfam network, and it made me laugh.

Low and behold, I was at home this afternoon when my Oxfam manager rang me and said, ‘I’ve had someone on the phone – something about social media and cockroaches – is that anything to do with you? ‘

Someone wanted the buy the book! So over the phone, I directed my manager to various alternative possible places where I could have  stashed it.

( You should go behind the scenes at an Oxfam bookshop one day to understand that things are run on stashes, piles, boxes, shelves, bags and things stuffed into all sorts of places.

Every now and then I get round to sorting out an area and find all sorts – the skeleton of a forgotten volunteer, for example.)

Anyway, he found it, we put the price up a bit, and I wait to hear who bought it. If I’d been there with the customer I would have asked for the whole story about who was going to be so delighted on Christmas Day but I guess, I will never know.

 

 

 

There are times when I wonder

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Books, with just really good titles.

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

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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.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Day in the Life

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So, here is a typical Reluctant Sussex Housewife day.

Be warned, dear reader, this is not that exciting, but what can you expect from a blog that tells you on the label that this is housewife-ness and deepest Sussex.

It is also a rather long day and so you might want to go and do something more interesting or self-improving.

So, the Aga is on. I do miss it in the summer but realise that you can’t have a large oil-burning block sitting in your kitchen with the back door open and sitting in just your knickers because it is just too hot.

But now, today, even with the lovely warm weather we have been having, it is now back on and there is a chicken casserole in it.

The first casserole of the autumn.

(The best beloved’s son and girlfriend were down at the weekend and wanted a fire – we lit one. The first fire of the autumn.)

But before I could get the casserole together, I had a few other things to do.

Get my BB and his car with a problem to the garage for 8 am, and then him to the station to go and do grown-up policy things in London.

Then I had to get to a meeting on health and safety and catch up with some news, more of that later, over the Downs and far away.

That in turn, required me to look casually competent, a look I don’t often have to do for dog walking/Oxfam.

Girls, that did require some thought – in the old days, that kind of ‘uniform’ would have been second nature but these days, I have to give it a bit of thought – not that anyone noticed I suspect.

Dog walked, BB on train, I found myself very early for H&S appointment, so I nipped into Sainsbury’s for the chicken (see casserole above) and incidentally a useful couple of bras – as you do.

So, the H&S stuff was in relation to The Garden Show which happens in June and I work there for a few days with many very nice people and especially my lovely friend.

Her role is to smooth the ruffled feathers of exhibitors and mine is to behind her making equally soothing noises whilst keeping an eye out for trip hazards and missing children.

I love working at The Garden Show and am there because of my late friend – she who plied me with wine and then, dear reader, imagine my surprise the next day, I realised I had agreed to be the H&S person.

Should I believe in people looking down, as it were, I would think that she would be splitting her corsets seeing me looking like someone who knew what they were talking about – but hey, the man who did know what he was talking about said we were fine, and there was nothing much he needed to advise us to do differently.

So, to run an event you have to have an eye on the big picture and the finer details and the great woman who runs it now, does just that.

She keeps an eye on the financial disaster unfolding for an exhibitor, she knows all the car parkers by name, she remembers the name of the young person who came for a bit of holiday money and wants him back next year.

And today, she had her eye on her daughter’s broken leg – no, skateboards, alcohol and children’s parties do not mix – the terms and conditions she needed to amend, a couple of dogs and their relationship, as well as being more thoughtful and smarter about H&S than I was.

So, enough about how great The Garden Show people are. I am sure you don’t need more eulogising, dear reader.

But just another smidgen of that: In the margins of that meeting, I caught up with stuff about people who are part of the family of The Garden Show – and yes I know that is a cliché but it is true – nepotism at its best.

Two of those people are seeing each other and do you know what, that was the best of news. Two very smart, funny, lovely, bright people and the news that gives you that warm feeing of things being good.

Dear reader, you can seriously give up at this point and help yourself to a large glass of wine or even go for a long walk, because there is more….

So, off back to Oxfam.

Now, I have been away for two weeks and it seems that in that time, there have been a large number of clear outs from schools and homes, of books they don’t want.

I thought I was on duty for the afternoon – not on the till, but clearing those books.

Boxes, bags, piles, tables, benches of them

Art books, paperback fiction, children’s books, out of date cookery books, Readers’ Digest books of Facts dated 1989, atlases with missing pages and missing modern countries ( John Le Carre era cold war atlases), a ( another bloody) collection of the complete works of Dickens, jigsaws with missing bits, aged library books, books from other charity shops with 50p written in pen on the inside…..

And more and more were coming in.

I slipped out to get milk for tea and bumped into someone I know and asked if he and his wife wanted to come for supper.

He runs the ‘proper’ bookshop and she is a really interesting woman who is helping set up the Harting Supper Club – I am sure I have told you about that before.

That’s what Petersfield is like, you bump into people – and that is nice and very Waitrose.

Anyway, back at Oxfam, I was upstairs and my colleague downstairs and we were filling sack after sack, after sack, after box, after sack – you get the picture.

In the end, I didn’t have to work the whole afternoon as I am working all day tomorrow – and do you know, there will still be boxes, bags, tables of books.

So I came home and put that casserole in the bottom of the Aga.

Meanwhile – and I do suggest you give up at this point because even I am getting bored – I sold a teak sideboard.

When we got back from Brussels and France, stuff didn’t fit in the house and ended up in the garage.

For some years, I have been planning on selling the teak sideboard but never had managed to get the bloody thing out of the garage – it is very heavy.

This weekend, the BB’s son and he got it out. I photographed it and put it on Gumtree and Ebay.

Clearly, I did not ask enough because it had sold – several times over – a few hours later.

Jim was first come, so first served. He turned up this evening and told me about how he and his wife had enlarged their house and now needed stuff to put in it.

He told me this as he peered into the garage and looked to see if there was anything else he might be able to use/buy.

And then he said, ‘ I read your blog.’

Good Lord, dear reader…..

So, I am getting the casserole out and awaiting the return of the BB and then it is tea and bed – another scintillating day in the life of a Sussex Housewife.

P.S. BB came home, ate some casserole and then turned Aga down to the minimum……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Frederick Cecil Banes Walker

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When I am sorting through the thousands of books donated to the village festivities, there are always some I hoick out because I think they might be worth something.

We sell all the paperbacks for 50p and the hardbacks for £2 – whatever the subject or size of the book.

Well, some books are just worth more than that and I am not going to let them go for next to nothing.

(Which reminds me, we have a woman and her mother who come every year to the bookstall and they, every year, complain that we charge too much. ‘Give over and don’t come next year’ are the polite end of what I want to say to her.)

As you will know if you have read the previous blog, donations of books come in thick and fast and we don’t keep track of who donated what so we take it as it comes.

Anyway, I had a pile of books which needed checking and indeed the rather rare Heath Robinson book is worth about £60 and my ever-so-slightly eagle eye for the niche books which are only printed in small quantities and are therefore valuable, paid off when I discovered that ‘Four Centuries of Liege Gunmaking’ is worth about £75.

A rare early guide book to Palma was also worth a bit and ‘The Mechanical World Pocket Diary and Year Book 1914’ is also worth a darn sight more than £2.

But it was the  book called ‘The Roll of Honour 1916’ that this story is about. Everyone killed in the war that year was listed with their photograph and a small biography (and there was one such book  produced for eery year of WWI.)

WWI memorabilia is very popular and it being the 100th year, I thought I would easily sell it on eBay and split the proceeds between the village festivities and Oxfam.

So, I listed it and I have to admit that I listed it wrongly, so instead of starting the bidding at £10 and hoping to make £30 or £40, I mistakenly listed it as ‘buy it now’. Indeed, someone did – within about 10 minutes.

But, dear patient reader, this is just the preamble to the real story here – so please bear with me.

Whilst I was flicking through the Roll of Honour book to check it was intact, no internal markings or pages ripped out, some paperwork fell out.

As usual I was cooking supper, making a list of things to do, checking emails etc etc and so I handed the bits of paper to my best beloved and asked him to check what they were.

He said, one was the commission for a soldier as a 2nd lieutenant. When I looked later, the next was a letter from the War Office saying where he was buried. The third was a postcard with a sketch on the front of the cemetery, and a description of the grave and its surroundings on the back.

It really makes you stop and think when you find something like that and I was wondering who it was who had made their way to the cemetery where ‘ The big grave under the apple tree is Captain Taylor, Scots Guards & is the only marble cross at present in the cemetery and is a good guide. ‘

The X on the drawing ‘Is his grave directly inside the little gate. The three near trees are all apple trees.’

I then looked at the commission which is a large and formal document which says,’ You are therefore carefully and diligently to discharge your Duty as such in the Rank of 2nd Lieutentant or in such higher Rank as We may from time to time hereafter be pleased to promote or appoint you to, of which notification will be made in the London Gazette and you are at all times to exercise and well discipline in Arms the inferior Officers and Men serving under you and use your best endeavours to keep them in good Order and Discipline. And We do hereby Command them to Obey you as their superior Officer and you to observe and follow such Orders and Directions as from time to time you shall receive from Us or any superior Officer according to the Rules and Discipline of War in pursuance of the Trust hereby reposed in you.’

It is dated October 3rd 1914.

He died on May 9th 1915

On November 20th 1916, his father was sent a letter saying he was buried at ‘ Le Trou, about two miles south of Fluerbaix. The grave has been registered in this office, and is marked by a durable wooden cross bearing full particulars.’

This 2nd lieutenant played test cricket for Somerset. Also, he played rugby and hockey. The has a Wikkipedia page. He had no links with Sussex and lived in Somerset all his life.

His name was Frederick Cecil Banes Walker.

Not a common name.

My neighbour is called Banes Walker.

So, of course, I went round with the commission, and my neighbour said Frederick Cecil Banes Walker was his uncle.

I have no idea who donated the book with these pieces of paper tucked inside.

No idea why they were here in Sussex.

 

 

 

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.

Colour Co-ordinated Books

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I am never quite a woman of the zeitgeist so it took me a while to catch up on the idea that books organised by colour are becoming popular.

(My partner would be shocked and appalled at the thought that there should be anything other than alphabetical and topic organisation in our bookshelves – but I have to say I quite like the idea.)

Anyway, a few weeks ago we had a donation which included some of those old blue Pelican books – much too ropey and brown to put on the shelves and so they are usually sacked forthwith.

The shelves ‘out the back’ where the donations are put, are an interesting place to find all sorts.

On this day there was a broken laptop support ( who on earth would think we could sell that?), several 1500 piece jigsaws ( also not a great seller – anything over 500 pieces and you can forget it as a sales item), a diary from 2011 used for scrap-paper, leftover christmas cards, a book on Arabic cookery from 1982 – and usefully in this case, a ball of string.

I tied up the blue pelicans into bundles of 10 and they sold.

Then, on another day, a man came into the shop and said to the volunteer at the till, ‘I’d like to buy that shelf please.’ ‘What?’, she said. ‘That shelf of books, all of them.’

He was an interior designer….

On a quiet Monday afternoon – we get a good few of those – I re-arranged the ‘old and interesting’ shelves into colours. Blue, green, brown, mixed (for the leftovers) and those with proper leather bindings.

Now, I cannot be sure that this boosted sales but by the following Monday some books which had become old friends over the months (and months) had found new homes.

Sometimes we put all red books in the window, or I do a table display with books which have images of faces on the front, or I do all the front-facing books ( those on stands facing you with their front, rather than their spines) in a colour.

I am no expert on merchandising but it amuses me now and then and whiles away the time.

And last time I checked, our shop was one of the few, if not the only, shop in our area to be in the blue rather than the red against all our Oxfam targets – we like blue.