sussex

Bastions Breached

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There are few bastions left between me as I think of myself and the caricature of a Sussex housewife I seem to be becoming – and one of the few was breached today.

( Do you breach a bastion and if you do, do you have an undefended citadel? I’m sure my Best Beloved will put me right on this.)

Anyway, suffice it to say I put entries into the village horticultural society spring show.

Those who know me well might find themselves taking a sharp intake of breath – I certainly did.

Now, you need to know this is not so much a jolly village event when people turn up with their daffs in a vase, or a couple of hyacinths, or a pickle they made last Autumn.

Well actually they do but they have to be within the rules of the national Horticultural Society which seem to be quite finickity – and are judged by visiting experts.

Your pickle or jam:

I never even thought about the daffodils:

Yes indeed.

The BB was very supportive and a whole lot better than me at flower arranging so this is what we put in the hellebore class: 

And a hyacinth.

By the way that vase is Roman glass – it did me no good.

Neither did the fact that we knew nothing about how to make sure hellebores don’t droop.

(Apparently, I learn form YouTube much too late, you should pick the ones that have set seed, or score the stems, maybe plunge  them briefly into boiling water and then into cold water…….)

Other, more experienced Sussex housewives obviously knew what they were doing.

But there was a cooking class and one of the categories was a leek and cheese tart. Now, I can make that with my eyes closed ( as they say).

I was a bit distracted when I made it and it didn’t turn out as my best ever so I thought I might scrap it and make another one.

But one of the few bastions left was the thought that I would not be true to myself if I found myself re-cooking an entry to the village horticultural society spring show.

So I didn’t.

I took it down to the village hall and told my good friend (very good gardener but not keen on cooking) and who said she had nothing in the fridge, she could have it for supper.

This is what the judge said:

My friend said she could imagine my face when I read those comments – mind you she also said she didn’t care as it was her supper.

So, I am assuming that she is eating it without worrying about the fact I hadn’t trimmed the pastry as well as I could. In fact I am sure she is.

I was expecting to think ‘OK done that once and that is more than enough.’ 

But alarmingly, I found myself back at home leafing through the list of categories for the summer show and ticking what I think I might enter.

Another bastion breached.

Salvaged

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

We get a lot of history books into the Oxfam shop, but not many written by hand.

And though perhaps not actually strictly a history book, it is a book which is a part of history.

This nicely (but now rubbed and faded on the outside,) marbled book holds a record of wartime salvage off the Sussex coast.

Before your mind wanders to a romantic story of villagers pillaging loot under the cover of darkness as the waves of the channel swish along a hidden slice of coastline, stop it.

This is a series of terse listings of what, where and who from 1943 to 1947.

Written, I am thinking, by men who were charged with creating a log to keep officialdom happy or at least undemanding, or just to have a record of what appeared on ‘their’ shores.

The title page is blank so they ignored the boxes asking who they were  – and if you read it carefully, you will see that perhaps officialdom was looking for a few more details. 

They knew what was found, where and who carried out the salvage but as to what it was worth, who was paid what as a result or who the owners were – it is all a mystery to us and perhaps them.

There is different handwriting as we move through the book and the years – some more legible and some a fraction less terse, but nowhere are we getting the backstory.

What ship shed its load of rubber? There were various amounts of rubber found at various dates, in places from ‘ bottom of sea lane, Angmering-on-Sea’ to five yards below the High Water Mark outside the Pheonix Club, Alma Hotel, Middleton-on-Sea, and one bale of unmarked rubber on the foreshore of the Craigwell Estate.

I have no idea who was filling in these entries and what official capacity they held, but we do get an idea if who was doing the salvaging.

Quite a number were Canadian soldiers – not entirely surprisingly as there were a lot in Sussex and presumably were allowed onto the fortified beach when ordinary locals weren’t.

But there were salvaging civilians including E W Morris, Lorry Driver, 50 Highfield Road, Bognor Regis.

And, Richard Davie, Police Constable, Police Cottage, East Preston, Sussex.

J O’Connell of Admiralty Road, Felpham salvaged ‘Paraffin Wax approx 150 lbs no marks.’

The names don’t repeat – with the exception of Constable Davie which might point to locals handing stuff over to him whether completely to not – so presumably these were not professional salvagers unless there was a significant number of them vying for stuff all along the Sussex coast.

I am assuming that most of what was found was flotsam (being the stuff that was not deliberately thrown overboard) as opposed to jetsam which was, you won’t be surprised to hear, was jettisoned.

And there are other more interesting finds than rubber or paraffin so, if you have the time and energy to read on.

It seems as if the entries all refer to things which ended up on the shore and indeed quite a lot is listed as being pulled above the high water mark.

But more portable stuff was ‘taken to a place of safety’ and interestingly, that place is rarely identified.

I could run away with the idea that places of safety might include shed, kitchen cupboards, or under counters but there is the official record – however thin and terse – of what arrived on land so presumably the salvagers were an honest lot.

For instance:

There are a number of dinghies, and a canoe complete with oars.

With a couple of exceptions, none of the boats had names. Perhaps that was common in the war, but where did they come from? What happened to the people in them? Why were people out in dinghies, or indeed canoes in the channel during a war?

Finally, perhaps the saddest entries are those of ships’ life rafts

Hopefully, we will find someone who wants to research/appreciate/understand this brief record of an aspect of Sussex coastal wartime history – if we do, I will let you know.

Oxfam Needs a Green Sofa

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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.

There are times when I wonder

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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.

img_2824

 

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.

img_2660img_2692

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Books, with just really good titles.

img_2282

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

IMG_2023.jpg

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.

img_2826

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……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Visit

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprising Sussex Housewives

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

As I live longer in Deepest Sussex, I find that my stereotypes of housewives have been challenged – or at least I have found women who baulk at them.

I had a lunch to thank the people who had helped me with the village festivities pop-up bookshop and someone came up with a really good idea.

She said we should create a supper club and get interesting people to come and have a conversation with us.

(Sharing credentials here rather than living on past glories, I need to tell you that I once ran a supper club for ‘the generals’ who were really semi-senior military leaders who wanted, needed and got, supper and a conversation with someone they would never normally come into contact with.

The speakers didn’t need to be famous and the subject was hardly ever anything to do with the military, but they had to be an interesting speaker.

So, we had the Chief Inspector of Prisons, someone talking about amazing Medieval master builders, mother and daughter who walked to the North Pole, an ex-Taliban refugee, a bee Professor, a bishop, someone talking about enduring mental health problems, a magician and so on.

Diligent readers, and my friends, will remember that the Supper Club is how I met the ‘best beloved’ who shares my Sussex idyll.

Anyway, enough living on the past glories I said I wasn’t going to do.)

Back to the main story here, a few of us went to the local pub last night to make this idea happen.

( Thank you, Vicky.)

We will create a membership of like-minded women who will pay say £10 per month and get four suppers a year and a conversation with someone interesting.

The issue is how to get people to speak to us – for expenses only.

After all, you can get all sorts of people to speak if you pay them handsomely enough, but we need to make ourselves interesting enough for speakers to forgo a fee.

Ahh, I hear you say.

A bunch of pony-tailed, four wheeled driving women living in very nice houses and fitting in a Pilates class between the private school sports day and a lunch with the girlfriends in that great little place we love so much, during which  you mention the simply wonderful gardener you’ve found – that will, indeed, be quite difficult to sell as an interesting audience.

Well, and I am amazed to hear myself say this, we are not all bloody like that.

Here in Deepest Sussex, again I say with some force, at least some of us are definitely not bloody like that.

So, whilst I will admit that The Guardian does not fly off the shelves of the village shop and there is a whole strata of our local society which runs the various village societies with an iron rule and impeccably good manners.We are not all blood like that.

And scratch the surface and you will find smart, funny, interesting women ( some living in lovely houses and driving 4x4s ) who want to keep their brains stretched.

And we are going to harness them and make this supper club work.

We will find a way of describing ourselves out of the stereotypes and to show ourselves as the women we really are – smart, funny, interesting, as I said before  – and get all sorts of fascinating people to say, ‘Blimey, they sound like a great group of people to spend an evening with.’

And there may even be some smart men around who will be allowed to come – as guests you understand – as long as they ask nicely and agree to load the dishwasher for a week.

Daphne Du Maurier and Brexit

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

“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.

The Wake

/ aspinalllucy / 1 Comment

Maybe if you know Jeremy Corbyn personally you don’t think he is ‘dismal, lifeless and spineless’ but his campaign to get Labour voters to vote remain certainly was.

Dear reader, I will come back to that so you have been warned.

In our village there was a very tactful lack of campaign posters on either side and a general tacit agreement in the pub – at least amongst the people we drink with – not to talk about it.

Maybe on Friday there were some hoop-doopey-do celebratory parties going on across our part of Deepest Sussex – but in our house there was a wake.

A very nice wake with good friends, and who better to have at a wake with, but there was a real sense of loss not just for us but for the next generation.

What right do we have to retreat into the post war view of Great Britain (with lots of capital letters) and leave the next generation out of the Europe they have grown up with and want to live in.

It makes me angry – but I do not think that everyone who voted to leave is a racist bigot.

I do think if I had voted to leave on the basis that there was £350m available now to put into the NHS and that immigration would be cut to ‘the tens of thousands’ I would be mightily fed up to find Farage finally admitting that the £350m was a lie, and that the Brexit lot are saying that controlling immigration does not mean cutting the numbers.

And many people did vote based on those promises.

Boris, the man campaigning ‘against the elite’ spent yesterday playing cricket as a guest of Viscount Althorp.

If this is the man to be our new leader and unite us, then ‘god’ help us.

Mind you, I have to say – and so back my beginning – some MPs in the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn should be ashamed of themselves.

Lots of this campaign – of course not here in Deepest Sussex but in places where life is just a teensy bit tougher – was about being mightily fed up with the political class, with obsessive media coverage of the machinations of Westminster, with being seriously out of touch and definitely not using the old maxim of ‘you have two ears and one mouth, use them wisely.’

I cannot claim to be in the least bit bothered that the Tory Party is tearing chunks out of itself and each other but someone/some party should be studying up for fairness.

David Cameron said we were all in this together but we weren’t. We aren’t. And the people who have felt this most keenly have told them all to bugger off.

I think it was the wrong way to say it. Leaving the EU does not make for a change in the political class in Britain and if you think Boris is going to make a significant difference to NHS waiting times in Sheffield or Scunthorpe or Southsea you may find out that he doesn’t. No way.

But we need a Labour Party leader who does care about fairness and surely Jo Cox wasn’t the only Labour MP to be such a great person who worked for real values, who fought and laughed and could talk to people and who believed in the same things that lots of us – in or out – believe in. Someone out there in the Labour Party must be able to do that – and be a leader.

Jeremy Corbyn may well be a man of principle but his ideas are 30 years out of date ( at least, and I should know because they were out of date when I was a political lass.) One of his supporters said he had a ‘nuanced’ message.

But a referendum is binary, back and white, in or out – not bloody nuanced.

And yes, he campaigned around the country but to meetings called by his supporters. That is just not good enough. Not by a country mile as we might say round here. He has to go.

However, and deep breath at the end of that rant, there were few things which made me laugh in the last few days but here are two of them:

A great Facebook posting which said,

Cornwall has voted to leave!! Cornwall received almost £800m of EU Objective One funding between 2000-2013. Didn’t you like your new university? Massive new tourism infrastructure (Eden Project)? or super-fast broadband provision?

That’s a lot of money to replace by selling Poldark tea towels…

And then there was the news that the person who set up the petition which at time of writing has more than 3m people demanding a new referendum ( which we won’t get, or maybe even could cope with, but it sends a message) was actually an ‘outer’ who though they would lose.

Back to the wake. We had nice food, we had music, we had a laugh and almost a cry, we had thoughts about what we could do and should do to, realised that this went across party boundaries – whether you were in or out – and what a big day it was to be together.

I am planning a series of future wakes.

When Boris becomes Tory leader. When Boris gets elected. When the Labour Party again fails to get its act together, when Trump gets elected…… so much wake planning to do.