Charity Shops

Hinterland

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There is a hinterland to the bookshop not visible to the customers’ naked eye and if you have never volunteered in a charity shop, I am sure you also remain blissfully unaware of what it takes to make the wheels run smoothly.

I am here to enlighten you, just a little bit.

Next door-but-one to our shop is the HSBC and although Oxfam doesn’t bank with them, the counter staff are always happy to give us change – we go in there most days with a £20 notes asking for pound coins, or looking for 50 pennies.

Life on this front got a lot easier when almost everyone used a card to pay, but now cash is creeping back and you would be surprised just how many people want to pay for a £2.49 book with a ten pound note. ( Mostly they want change for car parking.)

We buy them posh biscuits at Christmas as a thank you. ( That’s the bank, not change-hungry customers.)

Next door on the other side is an estate agents and – they hold the shop key for us.

For all the obvious reasons we do not have a key for every volunteer, so we need somewhere for the afternoon volunteer to leave it at the end of the day, and another volunteer to collect it the next morning.

They get thank you biscuits too.

Bet that little bit of administration had not crossed your mind…..

Sometimes we get books donated which fall into the loose ( sometimes very loose) category of erotica.

I know enough about this genre to know that old erotica can be very valuable but most of the time it is not, ( though sometimes rather ‘interesting’) and we can’t/don’t sell it in the shop.

So I collect it, suitably on a top shelf, and when I have a decent pile, I call John who runs the second hand bookshop in town and has fewer qualms than Oxfam, and he gives me a tenner for the lot.

Every little helps…….

We have a jeweller in town who will take our broken gold bracelets and odd silver earrings and give us the scrap value and look at stuff we don’t know how to price and tell us what to do.

Then there is the model railway enthusiast recommended by my hairdresser – see a previous blog – and now needed to work out the latest unearthed bit of models railwaying.

And then there are the volunteers.

One priced all the cameras and camera equipment we unearthed from under a pricing bench.

We sold nearly everything.

He is the man who also refills the pricing guns.

Now this may not sound like much but these bits of dated technology are the way we get a price on the back of every book.

I am sure there must be a a more up-to-date equivalent, but if so they haven’t reached Oxfam yet.

Everyone I know at the shop has had a go a refilling these things with the rolls of blank labels and, with one or two exceptions, have failed.

David gets them sorted in about five minutes. Part of his hinterland was working for a labelling company once in his past – so that was lucky.

We have a couple of volunteers who are/were engineers and that helps with mantling and dismantling things, and making this bit of kit work with that bit of kit.

The Best Beloved has been know to frame the contents of books falling apart and therefore not saleable but with lovely plates/illustrations.

(And we have a pile of old prints so I need to check whether we can get mounts and cellophane and posh them up a bit so we can sell them.

We could do with someone donating a v-shaped print holder – so if you are having a clear out…)

We have a volunteer ( and her husband) who have made a diorama, a fireplace, wallpapered our whole window with wrapping paper…..

We have a few other creative people and one of them has designed some bookmarks.

We had unearthed a load of bookmarks but have used them all up.

And it seems to me that a bookshop should have bookmarks – and some designed by our volunteer and printed at cost by the local printer ( who is very kind) will be a bonus.

We hope to sell them otherwise we will be £100 down ( even at cost). That same nice printer will give me not one invoice for £100, but 10 of £10 so that the takings don’t take one big hit.

Then there was the key man who came to and fro to our shop refining the key cutting so that we didn’t have to change the whole lock. I nod to him and his bulldogs every time I walk past.

And most recent addition to our helpful hinterland is someone who has a hinterland of his own inhabited by coins, banknotes and old maps experts.

But more of that another time.

Catch Up

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So, it has been a while so here is a quick dash through the last few weeks before we get back to maps, coins and support networks.

Yes, thank you, we did well in the bookshop over Christmas. Not astounding but certainly enough to keep our heads above water with a certain air of pride.

The manager has permanently gone and we are waiting (with bated breath) for a new one.

And now we are in the dull days of trying to make silk purses out of quite a lot of sows’ ears.

All our best stock was thrown at Christmas and so we are left with the rather tired and weary – though we still get a few delights.

It is not that we don’t get donations, it is just that popular though vegetarianism is, no one wants to buy a dog-eared cookery book from the 1990s – where is an Ottolenghi when you need several?

Courtesy of central Oxfam, we were allocated several boxes of unsold Spur’s merchandise. Yes, the football club Tottenham Hotspur.

Why anyone thought the Spurs baby grows and woolly hats and picture frames would sell in a bookshop in Petersfield is beyond me ( they didn’t).

But such is their faith that we have just taken delivery of another two large boxes….

And there was one cupboard left to clear  – accessible once we got the manager’s keys back.

In it we found a full father Christmas outfit and decorations – not much use locked away until after the festive season.

And why the key to this was kept on the manager’s personal bunch of keys, well your guess is as good as mine.

There was a Hornby train set, a copy of the Petersfield post from 2009, lots of old Oxfam publicity material, a fine wood plane, another old map – yes indeed – two whisks and a mixing bowl, a used artist’s palette, a flat cap, marching compass, a stash of pendants, two silver napkin rings, a pair of new kitchen taps and a night vision monocular.

There was a time when I railed against the manager’s hoarding but now I am disappointed that we might be getting to the end of treasure hunting ( and selling.)

Mind you we do have a lot of cupboard space.

Track & Typewriters

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For anyone (at all) still with me on this, now for the models railway and typewriter – not a sentence I would have expected to write.

I knew nothing about model railways but an Oxfam instinct made me say yes when someone donating boxes of books said, ‘By the way, do you want some model railway stuff?’

And, I have watched enough (actually more than enough) Antiques Roadshow to know that can be valuable stuff.

It came in four large boxes and an old suitcase, and I went to get my haircut.

‘Don’t suppose you know anyone who knows about model railways?’ I said.

‘Strange you should say that,’ said my hairdresser, ‘ One of my kid’s godfather is a model railway enthusiast.’

So, the lovely model railway enthusiast and ex-real-train-driver came to help and spent an afternoon looking at what we had.

Lots of it is not of much value but will make a lovely display on the table. 

Some of it, we might be able to sell online.

We have track by the plenty – straight and curved; we have signal boxes and signals; we have a suspension bridge; we have old 125 carriages; we have freight wagons; we have christmas trees; we have grass coloured stuff and pink stuff for putting blossom on your model trees….

(And that is more semi colons than I have used in a long time.)

And, I now know considerably more about model railway stuff than I ever thought I would.

I do know quite a bit about typewriters.

When I was a young journalist, shortly after the Boer War, we had never heard of desktop computers.

We had shared or communal typewriters – never quite enough to go round if we were all in newsroom at once.

And indeed, one of the (shared) typewriters was a really old ‘upright’ one which probably explains why I bash the keys of my Mac too hard indeed.

not quite as old as this but a very close cousin

When you were on the day shift you went into the newsroom and grabbed a typewriter and hoped to get a half way decent one.

One of them, I remember, was so well used the ‘e’ had worn out. So, once you had typed your story, you had to go back through it pencilling in all the ‘e’s missing from your deathless prose.

For every story we wrote, we had two sheets of very thin, poor paper and sandwiched inside was a sheet of carbon paper so we had a copy of what we wrote in case the newspaper got sued and needed to prove what we had written.

Some (indeed sometimes, most) of what we wrote ended up on the spike – literally a sharp spike on the news editor’s desk on which he (and it was always a he) impaled stories that were not going to make it into the next day’s paper.

If you wanted to look up some background to a story, you would go to the librarian and ask for the relevant packet.

And it was a cardboard packet of newspaper clippings and sometimes spiked copy which he ( and it always was a he) had thought to save and file under that particular packet heading – it was sometimes (often) a lottery as to what was in any packet and how relevant its contents might be to what you wanted to research.

We would have thanked any god for Google.

So, after the rinse aid and tins of salmon, I was very gratified to find this.

It turns out to be worth £50. ( Thanks to those very same gods for eBay.)

We will put it on the table with books that would (probably) have been written on a typewriter – not a quill, or fountain pen or a laptop.

So, Hemmingway, Enid Blyton, F Scott Fitzgerald, E E Nesbit, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, C S Lewis, Sylvia Plath and any others I can rootle around and find.

The danger of this plan is that the typewriter sells immediately and customers look rather bemused at the random collection of books – but for £50 I am willing to risk that.

Cues, Maps and Fishcakes

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In the greater scheme of things, see also the climate crisis, a week of full-on stuff in an Oxfam shop is small beer. 

But for those of us doing that week, it adds up.

And it is another week of unearthing stuff. It seems we have not (just yet) plumbed the depths of ignored treasures in the shop. 

And fishcakes.

For those (few) who are following this closely, a bit of an update. 

Though it is not absolutely certain, it looks like the cat is not coming back so the mice have a few things up our sleeves – remember the green sofa? it maybe happening – but more of that another time.

So, we have billiard cues, an 18th century large map, some more coins, a book or two, and a vintage typewriter to come.

So, let’s start.

In the corner next to the back door are some poles propped up and among them I spotted something which I thought might be a large and ancient telescope.

Now, dear reader, you might think that I should have looked closely at such a potential treasure but a customer needed serving and I got distracted and anyway it had been there for years and years so wasn’t going anywhere fast.

I mentioned it to the volunteer on the till and then went upstairs to do something, hopefully something important and useful.

A while later, he told me it was a billiard cue and he thought it was Edwardian.

Mmmm, interesting.

Next day, he tells me it is made by Riley so classy stuff and I make a mental note to do some research.

Again, I went upstairs to do something urgent/important/I meant to do last week but ran out of time.

Half an hour later, he buzzed up on the ‘intercom’ to tell me someone had just donated another one.

What? The original cue had been standing there for years and the week we start to look at it, another one comes in….

The other volunteer is now volunteering to take them both to the local snooker club to get some idea of what they are worth. 

I am not sure how we would sell online as how do you send something which is nearly as tall as I am…….

Meanwhile, we have more coins and notes.

There is a rule, at least in our shop, if you put something in the window or on the table you get more of them.

History books, cookery books, jigsaws, military history, paintings etc – and in this case coins and notes.

So, if you are an assiduous reader, you will recall that we have had a money tree in the window and alongside we have had bags of old British coins – farthings, pennies, shillings, florins, half crowns, threepenny bits, silver sixpences.

And they have sold – not least to people who want ‘real’ coins in their Christmas puddings.

Anyway, a large ice-cream box of coins duly arrived.

I went in early to see if I could make up some more bags of coins we could sell then before the table changes theme – and then send the rest off to Guildford Oxfam where they have a numismatist who can value them. 

Though we don’t get the value attributed to our shop.

Yes I know, I know, it is money for Oxfam so who cares which shop it comes from?

Well with a bit of embarrassment at this confession, I do.

So, of course I sent some off to Guildford, but I have kept back the George II and George III coins, the coins with Jewish symbols which look too old to be Israeli, commemorative Victoria coin/medal to celebrate the laying of the first stone of the Birmingham courts building and so on.

I rang our antiquarian expert to ask if he new any coin experts and whilst I was at it, did he want a look at our old map (more of that later) and he said, ‘Well no, but I know a bit about coins, I will come and have a look.’

At this point, I need to tell you he hasn’t been in yet so there is not immediate resolution to this story but I will keep you up-dated.

And likewise with the map and the model railway. But you will get fishcakes.

So the map was found by another volunteer.

I had been clearing out yet another stuffed set of filing trays when she asked me to stop.

OK I thought, she doesn’t feel it is appropriate to clear out the manager’s filing whilst he is away.

But I was wrong.

‘I love clearing out stuff, so can I do it.’

Last week she got round to it and, among the endless stuff to be thrown away, she found a couple of maps and an old guide to London.

One of the maps was a 1907 Post Office issued map of London – but it had come apart into two pieces and is probably worth only about £20 to someone who has a big wall to fill.

The guide is nice but not worth much either.

The other map, however, is as big as our kitchen table, dated 1777, a map of the 25 miles around Windsor, original and a real delight.

Now, and here is another coincidence ( remember the billiard cues?)

I went down onto the shop floor and was talking to the volunteer (the same volunteer who had spotted the cues) and told him about the discovery of the map.

The only customer in the shop was a young man of about 20.

‘I know a bit about maps,’ he said,’ Could I have a look?’

Of course he could.

He said it was not a copy and it was made in a time when turnpike roads were becoming more common and King George III had held a competition to get maps made – and of course, George lived in Windsor.

There was a flurry of map-makers doing their stuff and some were apparently more fast than accurate. 

And indeed, though we have not looked for inaccuracies, it is certainly keen to be nice to the king.

Want to see it?

I will get a better photo when we can lay it out on the floor and get a wide-angled shot from up a ladder, but this will have to do for now.

I am not sure what counts as a remarkable hill…. but clearly the turnpike roads and cross roads were counted as important. 

A similar map is for sale in a posh shop in Curzon Street for £750. Whether ours will be of that value remains to be seen. 

Now to fishcakes.

So, I have finally finished clearing out our stockroom.

It is not big. Think  very small prison cell or reasonably sized pantry.

It has been ‘home’ to a lot of stuff which really needed to be cleared out – a lot.

Getting to the final stretch of clearing out I uncovered a vintage typewriter (but you will have to wait for that story), and a small bin.

In it was some rinse aid, a packet of pegs, some Gaviscon and three tins of pink salmon.

Really?

I presume it was some shopping that someone left behind and the manager put it in the stockroom and then, as with so much other stuff, promptly forgot it and/or ignored it.

I used on for our supper before I took the photo

I bought the cans – still in date I hasten to add.

So, to make fishcakes for you and the neighbours, take a can or two of ‘uncovered’ pink salmon.

Cook and mash ( coarsely) some potatoes with a good ‘dollop’ of butter –  but no milk.

Add them together with some nice capers, finely chopped parsley or coriander if you have that instead, and some dill if you have it – dill is really good.

Make into cakes with your hands – not too big – and put in the fridge for a while/overnight…

Lightly beat and egg ( or two if you are doing lots.)

On a plate put some plain flour or panko breadcrumbs.

Dip each fishcake in egg and then coat with four or breadcrumbs.

Fry in oil on moderate heat and serve with salad and the story of the day to your Best Beloved – and even he was a bit surprised to find Oxfam had provided supper.

Oxfam Needs a Green Sofa

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I have an Oxfam plan  – but it may well not work out in practice so I am putting it out to you to imagine – because there will be only one photo. 

(Of course if it works, there will be lots more photos in another blog, or several….)

Assiduous reader, if you are still with me, you may well know that we have a window and table display to sort out.

The window lasts for two weeks but the table needs changing every week – you need books and extra supplies to keep them both filled when pesky customers start buying your display.

But this idea needs only one, or two, or a few books.

So, you walk into the shop and see a slightly battered old green Edwardian sofa.

It would be cleaner than it is now – but still not a pristine sofa.

Now, every week you would see a tableau.

Someone has just got up to make a cup of tea, go to the loo, answer the door, or whatever.

Their ‘life’ is left behind on the the sofa with room for a customer(s) to sit down if they need to.

( Our still-away cat has always refused to have sitting opportunities in the shop – one of the reasons why this might not work  –  but we have a demographic which appreciates the chance to rest while looking at books.)

You need to know that all the books mentioned are open and laid down – the sofa sitter has just put them down when called away.

So, back to your view of the sofa. These area few of the tableaus you might see.

You see some knitting, a cardigan and a pile of 1950s magazines.

There is a dog lead, a winter jacket, a bag of dog treats and a book on dog training.

Some wrapped Christmas presents, some sellotape, some Christmas cards and ’Twas The Night Before Christmas book or Its A Wonderful Life DVD.

And while I am on the festive theme, a dinner jacket and women’s sparkly bolero thrown over the back of the sofa, with her shoes discarded too. You could have a book on hangover cures…

A basket of clothes needing ironing, an iron (we still have four for those of you who have been reading for a while) and a copy of 50 Shades of Grey or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Female Eunuch.

A pair of binoculars, muddy boots on a newspaper sheet, a camera, a notebook and a book on bird-watching.

An Oxfam throw, a mug, packet of lemsip, a hot water bottle and a copy of Cold Comfort Farm.

Another Oxfam throw and some chocolate. DVDs such as when Harry Met Sally, Brief Encounter, or other ‘love’ films, and a copy of Graeme Green’s The End of the Affair.

A pile of old leather-bound books, a pair of slippers and a pipe.

A waistcoat and posh walking stick, maybe a hat, and a copy of a P G Wodehouse.

Laptop, notebook and phone and a novel – should have been working from home but got a bit distracted….

Cookery book, pinafore, shopping list, table plan, some napkins, and a note saying, ‘ You can’t get Yotam Ottolenghi ingredients in Petersfield.’

I think that is enough for now, but I have a longer list. Of course, I do.

We shall see if this ever works but I really hope it does.

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.

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.’

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.

img_1980

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emails

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Despise though I might the GCHQ watching of us all, I am minded to think that just a check through my emails when I get back from a trip might give anyone, with an ounce of sense, an idea of the life of a Sussex Housewife.

You don’t really notice the emails every day but when they mount up after a while, you can get a picture of the woman behind them.

So, here we go – a run down of the emails I get:

House of Fraser – now I am a hell-bent charity shopper but there are times when I go for a 70% off sale and if I do, HoF do it well. Last year in a moment of insomnia at about 3 am, I bought a Calvin Klein coat reduced from £350 to £79 – and I love it even though I already had a coat for every season/day/mood/colour/outfit.

I do have to say that one of my coats was bought by my mum from Oxfam about 40 years ago and I still wear it with enjoyment.

Mr Fothergill’s Seeds – up until very recently, I was a lacklustre gardener. However, the kind attention and instruction of my good friend over the road who told me what to do and how to do it, has changed all that. Now I can spend a day in the garden, dividing my irises and planting a hundred bulbs.

God knows what I originally bought from Mr Fothergill and why I signed up for his emails but I would have known nothing about what to do with them. Now I happily google what to do with my crocosmia and already the garden is looking better.

Thanks I have to say to Juliet, rather than Mr Fothergill.

Trip Advisor – now I know people are snitty about Trip Advisor but I find it a useful check. Once my best beloved booked us into a hotel in Lewes so that we had a place to change and sleep the night around a friend’s wedding. He didn’t check Trip Advisor who in no uncertain terms would have told him to think again and book anywhere but this place.

To be fair, it was billed as the oldest coaching in Lewes and was on the high street – but by god it was awful.

After waiting a while in the hallway – avoiding the sticky carpets, the jukeboxes and the very drunk people (at 12 noon) we were told that the room we had booked was unavailable because the previous people had trashed it.

Thank the lord.

I asked to use the bathroom to change and found that its definition of a shower was a hose attached to the taps….

We drove home that night.

Trip Advisor keep extolling me to add new reviews with the promise that I will get another badge – I am not sure what these badges are for but I like the idea anyway so I review away and apparently 20,000 people have seen my reviews.

I am not sure I believe that but I carry on anyway.

Refugee Action – now this is my street cred of emails. I read them and sign petitions but don’t do much else. But I do read and respond to the Rural Refugee Network which, as I might have said before, is a fab small charity which aims to make people welcome here.

Then there are all those sites asking for you to sign a petition of some sort – proper wages, the fight against people trafficking, grammar schools and so on and so on.

I sign, some of them, and then I go to Twitter and read Brian Bilston, the twitter poet and the tweets about the Archers and then I go to Facebook and check up on what other people are doing.

I had promised myself that I would never post a picture of any meal I ever had on Facebook on the grounds that I hated other people doing it – why do I want to see your breakfast?

But then we stopped in Thirsk for a late lunch – not least because we had misread the atlas and confused kilometres for miles and didn’t want to arrive at my sister’s too early.

Anyway, the best beloved was dragged away from the reasonable sandwich shop, protesting mildly, and made to walk a few yards to the next cafe where we had a wonderful lunch.

And I put on Facebook a picture of my quiche and salad – it was just so beautifully presented – and then I used their wifi to look at my emails……..

A Day in the Life

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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……