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A Bit Of A Week

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So, it has been a bit of a week in the bookshop, a bit of a week indeed.

There are a lot of meanwhiles in this blog, I am warning you dear reader, but there is an update on the green sofa if you have been reading assiduously……

Let’s start with classical music. Our volunteer who does classical music was infuriated last year when the cat took away his carefully curated shelf of Christmas gift CDs which he had been saving for some months.

These are not those – just in case you are a classical music afficiando

No consolation or advance warning, a refusal to clear any other shelves to make room, just the explanation that there needed to be room for Oxfam new goods – gifts and the like – and ‘anyway classical music never sells.’

Well, this year the mice promised that the classical music Christmas gifts’ shelf would be preserved.

On Thursday, I got a call from that volunteer to say £250 worth of those curated and saved CDs had sold to one customer.

Meanwhile, another volunteer who sells jewellery online for us took her ‘collection’ of bits and pieces (odd earrings, a cigarette case etc) to a local jeweller for scrap value, and was hoping for about £50.

She got £215.

We were on a roll.

Meanwhile, don’t say I didn’t warn you, the model railway needed to be put on the table.

The very nice model railway expert came in late on Monday afternoon – we are closed then but that gives us time to do the table, the window, generally tarting up the shop without customers getting in the way.

He and I spent a couple of hours pricing up and presenting model railway stuff on the table.

I was very grateful, and pleased and then later in the week, he texted me to say he had Covid.

So, that means I have been in house-isolation ( bulbs getting planted.)

Meanwhile, it has sold really well – another bonus for the week.

Meanwhile, we have started on the green sofa.

And I have plans for the next few weeks.

Next week will have a jacket, a pair of wellies, a book The Perfect Puppy, Jess’s spare bed, dog treats, a lead and collar – you get the idea – and a photo of Jess in her bad days….

Meanwhile, when sorting some books the other day, we found a book called The Husband’s Mistake. We thought we could have a shirt with a lipstick smear on it.

And then I found these.

(Now, in case you don’t know Hemingway and Gellhorn were married and he was just a bit unfaithful…)

Meanwhile, the 1777 map.

So, we have got good photos of it and they are now with someone who lives in our village and who has a specialist auction business.

And, they are going to someone in Sotheby’s and another auction house – and we will see. But for the time being, here are the proper photos……

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

Friends of Friends

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My circular walk takes me and Jessie from our back door up to the South Downs Way, along a bit and then down and back round – I have to say that I am just boasting about this as it has no real relevance – neither has this picture of Jessie, not least as it is a summer picture, but please, as they say, live with me on this.

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Today was frosty and bright with lovely sun and it was a delight to be out and walking in such weather and seeing the views. But like all things, you get complacent about your surroundings.

So, instead of just walking and admiring the view, I took to musing what I would do with a significant lottery win. I am not talking a million or two here, I am going for Euro Millions.

Now and then I buy a lottery ticket just so that I can have this fantasy, and it works on a walk, especially useful if it is not cold, lovely and clear, but a drudge of a walk through mud and rain.

After taking care of immediate family, and donations to charities involved in causes I believe in – refugees, clean water, the amazing Medicine San Frontier, education for girls – there is still a lot of Euro Millions left over.

I can’t believe I will ever stop buying my clothes from charity shops or rescuing ‘brown’ furniture from auctions.

So, after we have bought a bigger house and clean, dry barns to be a home to such thing as Georgian dressers (bought at a fraction of the price that some pine number would fetch), there will still, as I say, be a lot leftover.

But thanks to my walk, I have a plan.

I am going to set up a fund called Friends of Friends.

The idea is that anyone we know who wants to do a project which has some benefit to other people gets some money.

It can’t be money just to make someone’s life easier – worthy though that would be – it has to be of interest/use to others.

It doesn’t have to be charitable – it can be a business, and event, an entertainment, a project, but it has to benefit more than just the person getting the money.

It is only available to people with two degrees of separation from us – that, of course dear reader, means someone we know, or someone who knows someone we know.

Already I can think of someone who could make some really interesting art projects in Liverpool and another who could utilise buildings in deepest Herefordshire to run very special courses to help people do better presentations and lots of other things.

I know someone who is trying to change the world through advanced storytelling – or at least he was last time I talked to him.

Someone else would probably have a project up her sleeve for women in Bosnia, another would have an idea or two about what could be really useful in York…..

By the time I was heading back up our lane, I had started to outline the email I would send round everyone I know, with the criteria.

And I was planning how many interesting times we would spend at the opening of these ventures.

So, I got home after my walk (all 11,000 steps of it ) and told the Best Beloved that I was going to the village shop to get a paper, a lottery ticket, and why.

And, he said a long time ago when he had been dealing with big, big sums of money and people competing for it, he had thought then of how good it would be to create the same kind of thing but generously and philanthropically.

Go for it, he said.

So if you have an idea or project that would fit the bill, I would love to hear about it.

But, I have to say, I have not won the lottery – yet.

Seizing Today

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Last night, we went to the pub as is usual on a Friday.

(I realise this might not be the most riveting intro to a blog but if you can bear with me, it might just get a bit better as the paragraphs go on – or at least I might get to the point.)

Anyway, Nick had just got home from being away for a bit just as I was going out of the door to walk down to the local hostelry with my female neighbours and our dogs. Women and dogs walk, men take the cars.

So, we had a nice time, sat outside, dogs running about – our dog has a habit of networking the whole pub garden, offering her business cards to anyone and everyone and offering herself up for adoption, but we get her back in the end.

So, we women later gently weaved home across the fields with the dogs, and some god was in some sort of heaven and all was well. ( Yes, the men went home in the car.)

Then, at home, Nick and I got talking – was we hadn’t had time to catch up – and opened a bottle of wine. Now, it was nice to talk about what he had told the House of Lords committee etc  (as well as the meltdown in the Oxfam shop caused by the introduction of a new till) but it would probably have been better to do it with a cup of tea – but then that is not us.

Suffice it to say, that by the end of the evening we had decided to write a paper together on the comparisons between current Chinese foreign policy and the Mongol empire of the 1200s.

No, of course we won’t. Despite the fact that I love Mongol history and he is really interested in what the Chinese are up to, we could never write a paper together – divorce would be the easy option.

But, to get nearer to the point. We woke up with a hangover, I went to Oxfam and did some stuff and then we went to meet some old friends of his for lunch – well, getting eventually to the point….

So, hangovers akimbo, we went to meet them in a pub halfway between where they live and where we live.

I had organised it in a moment of realising that you don’t have infinite time to catch up with friends, you think you do, but one day you find out you haven’t.

(It happened to me – I had this brilliant, amazing friend and even though she was geographically just over the hill, I didn’t see enough of her  – and now she is gone.)

So, we seized the day and spent it having lunch in a country pub, chatting swapping notes on charity shop shopping, ebay bargains, whether the state has any right to snoop, what to do when you are not working, guns in America, how much we use sailing phrases in everyday language, family news…..

And do you know what? that is enough seizing the day for me.

I am not going to leap out of planes, camp in the Sahara, learn to speak Chinese, run a marathon – all good things, but not for me. I am happy seizing a day with lovely people and a lazy lunch – nothing could be better.