volunteering

Unearthed Treasures

/ aspinalllucy / 1 Comment

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

/ aspinalllucy / 3 Comments

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.

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But it is not going to happen.

Firstly, I need structure and left to my own devices, I would fiddle about with time week after week, after week, until months had gone by and I would have nothing to show for it.

Secondly, I need contact with people and am rubbish at doing stuff on my own – I am not sure how many collective textile art beginners groups there are in Petersfield, but I am guessing not that many.

And I like my fellow volunteers and enjoy their company. The dog is great and the Best Beloved is great too, but they are not as good at being bossed around and they have their own stuff to do all day – sleep and write history, though the dog’s book is coming along very slowly she says.

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Thirdly, I would really miss the books.

For all the sacks there are gems. For all the depressing piles of browned Dick Francis collections, collections of  guides to the stately homes of England, all creased, and  who wants to buy a second hand guide to Windsor Castle? – there is a delight.

At the moment, I have a collection of old books on nature – ‘Nature for Bright Boys’ for example. Dull boys presumably should go off and make model aircraft or something.

And there are books with bizzare subjects. Who would think you could make your own horse equipment or why you would want to do that. Does stacking wood the Norwegian way differ from the way you would stack it in Deepest Sussex – too late to find out as it sold ten minutes after I put it out.

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

Books, with just really good titles.

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

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So, I will – and dear reader you can no doubt see my martyred air – carry on juggling shifts and sacking books and making plans which I never get to carry out because there are too many books to sack and sort and price.

But in between all that, I will build a collection of old medical books, books which are so pristine we can sell them at Christmas as a gift that the receiver will never know is a second-hand book.

I will look up all the old annuals we have been given – some are worth something but most aren’t – and put them out with the Tintin books which sell like hot cakes.

I will build a collection of princess books around the wrought iron frog wearing a small crown – he sold so there must be a princess somewhere in Petersfield who is an optimist.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Day in the Life

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So, here is a typical Reluctant Sussex Housewife day.

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

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

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

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

The first casserole of the autumn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, off back to Oxfam.

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

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

Boxes, bags, piles, tables, benches of them

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

And more and more were coming in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Lord, dear reader…..

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Visit

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We were told that our Oxfam shop was to be inspected by our area manager.

First off, I must say that she is a good woman who sees us (thankfully) as a very well-run shop and so, sensibly but a little exhaustingly, devotes her energies largely to shops that are having problems.

Occasionally she will turn up in Petersfield just to visit a shop that is fine, thank you very much, drink tea and just have a rest from sorting out problem stuff.

But anyway the rules are that we should, on a regular basis, cull books that don’t sell and ideally send them on to another shop for another chance.

Sadly, the last but one shop we were designated to send them on to closed. Then it was Bognor’s turn, but at risk of plagiarising a King George V,  Bognor is buggered. Or at least it is not taking our culled books any more.

Be warned dear reader, this is just the beginning of me explaining how we price books and run the shop so you can pick up a copy of Bedside Algebra (yes there is such a book – and we have it in stock) if you want something more riveting.

Anyway, the rules are that paperback novels should be culled every three weeks.

My great colleague Stella does that – and makes sure they are all in proper alphabetical order. And I mean proper order.

But that relies on having the stock to do it – and for the first time since I have been there, we are short on paperback fiction.

(So, by the way, if you live near Petersfield and have a lot of good quality paperbacks please bring them to us.)

The same three weeks lifespan, apparently, should be true of non-fiction, but really, give over. We just don’t have the stock.

But our area manager was due to visit us to make sure that everything was up to date, so we needed to make it easy for her to sign us off as being a shop that ‘does the right thing.’

At this point I should explain how this works:

Every book that comes into the shop has to be sorted – will it live or will it be put in a re-cycling sack? – what category should it be assigned to, will it fit onto the appropriate shelf upstairs before being brought down into the shop.

We have pricing guns that print the price and category. They are a bit old, hard to work and it took the manager being off ill for some time before I finally mastered how to re-load them with new rolls of labels.

It turns out that if you throw them across the room, they break easily and are a surprisingly expensive £50 to replace. It wasn’t me, but it could have been.

(Should you need to know, I can tell you each and every book category by heart. So, category 15 is for old and interesting and category 5 is hobbies and category 8 is travel – see what I mean.)

And then the week is put on in pencil. And that’s so that you can pick a book, any book, of a shelf and know how long it has been sitting there.

In an ideal world, you would have a culling regime and a small army of enthusiastic volunteers would take books off the shelf that had been there for too long (more than three weeks), and replace them with newly donated books, all checked, priced and sitting neatly on a shelf upstairs.

We don’t live in that world.

So, the point about putting the week in pencil is that if we want to leave a book to get another (rather more lengthy) chance, we can rub out the week and put another (later) week on it. (Should you be in the slightest interested we are currently on week 18.)

Because we are a) short of stock and b) short of people who do systematic culling, I decided to get every book in the shop re-labelled as week 16 – the week the area manager was due to visit.

I do realise that this is cheating. I do realise that the area manager is not stupid and she will know what is what. But also, I know that the rules don’t quite work if you end up with empty shelves. (I also know that our shop manager has to live by the rules so there are things it is better he doesn’t actively know about.)

Dragooning fellow volunteers into this plan, I had many a person armed with a rubber and a pencil to re-week for England.

Whoever had been putting the weeks on with a biro was soundly cursed – even though they may well have claimed that if culling was done properly, it wouldn’t need to be in pencil….. Yeah, whatever.

The shop looked really good. The day before the area manager was due , I got an extra shift out of one of my colleagues and, building on two weeks of work, we changed every front-facing book, re-did some books in the window (but knowing they were likely to sell quickly didn’t put them out until 4.30 so that they would be there when she arrived the following morning.)

I was on the till, he was upstairs rapidly clearing boxes of books – pricing them, tidying shelves, emptying bins, making sure we had chocolate biscuits – anything and everything to make the shop look Sunday Best.

Of course, dear reader, you will have guessed that an emergency came up and the area manager didn’t come.

I comfort myself with the notion that we are never one of her emergencies and the shop is now ready for us to manage the culling properly.

We now can go round systematically and cull based on the fact that week zero (or week 16) has been established – and more to the point, the only one of our volunteers who did proper culling in moving to Sheffield.

Of course, all of that relies on the good people of Petersfield having a clear out of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daphne Du Maurier and Brexit

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“Emma, who lives in Cornwall with her retired grandmother, a famous retired actress, wakes one morning to find that the world has apparently gone mad:

No post, no telephone, no radio, a warship in the bay and American soldiers advancing across the field towards the house.

The time is a few years in the future. England has withdrawn from the Common Market and, on the brink of bankruptcy, has decided that salvation lies in a union – political, military and economic – with the United States.

Theoretically, it is to be an equal partnership; but to some people it soon begins to look like a takeover bid.”

This is on the flyleaf of Rule Britannia, written by Daphne Du Maurier in 1972.

I had never seen this book before – but as you, dear reader, know by now, Oxfam is a Pandora’s box of surprises.

(Yesterday the box opened to reveal an inundation of books – just when Duncan, an Oxfam stalwart if ever there was one, and I thought we had the shop all sorted out – and they were mostly recycling-sack fillers.)

Back to Daphne.  As a (deflated) Bremainer, I am sure that we are living in the phoney war period and the real fall out will come over months and then years.

Yesterday, I was culling the Old and Interesting shelves and although we give them a longer chance than say, gardening, there comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and they have to go.

I picked up a book on the history of the Liberal Party in its early days and was about to throw it onto the reject pile, when I thought again – for the very pragmatic reason that I didn’t have enough alternatives to fill up the shelf.

Now, that book has been there for months but blow me down as they say, half an hour after I had moved it from one shelf to the one lower down, a woman bought it.

I asked her if she was a political historian and she said no but her daughter had done a masters in international politics and was now working in London.

Then she reduced her voice to a whisper and said, ‘ She was so angry about the Brexit vote that she joined the Liberal Party. She would have joined Labour but there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment.’

(Whilst social and mainstream media is full of stories about vile threats and angry denunciations of Remainers and Brexiteers alike, in Petersfield it seems, we reduce our voices to a whisper when talking politics.)

And that young , likely-to-be-on-the-receiving-end-of-the-bad-news-about-Brexit  womanis right, there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment and not likely to be one, or for that matter much in the way of a vigorous opposition party, for the foreseeable future.

So, with Trump dangerously likely to end up in the White House and the fallout of our referendum still to come, I am off to read what Daphne Du Maurier prophesied.

HartFest

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The Harting Festivities or HartFest as we on the committee have started to call it, being rather daringly modern, are over.

This, if you are not a resident of Deepest Sussex, is the day in the year when the village main street is blocked off and we have a village fayre ( as you can tell we are not all that daringly modern.)

I for my sins as they say, am in charge of the bookstall – and I want that name changed as well.

For, dear reader, this is not just a couple of trestle tables pushed together covered in dog-eared copies of Jeffrey Archers and endless variations of Aga sagas (this being Sussex), oh no this is much, much, more.

I won’t bore you with the full explanations of what you need to do to effectively run a HartFest ‘bookstall’ but suffice it to say you need to fill the event hall of the Legion Club with books – all in their topic categories, paperback novels in alphabetical groups so that yes, we can tell the small, frail customer where to search for her Nora James.

Filling, in this context meant about 110 banana boxes of books and if you are just about to think, ‘Well, OK, that is quite a few but let’s not go overboard on the numbers here,’ I would like to say to you, ‘ a) you try lifting that many books from where they are sorted to where they have to be – yes round the corner but still…and b) because, yes indeed, they are sorted that means we also took 10 car loads of rejects to the tip and that is hard work too.

Before I wallow in too much halo-polishing, I would like to say of course I don’t do this alone.

I don’t do it alone because I am rubbish at doing anything on my own and always want a group of people to be involved in anything I am, but also to do it alone would  take months and render me unable to do anything else all year.

So, a marvellous group of people helped sort, moved the books and ran the bookstall on the day and lest this turn into a badly written piece for the parish magazine thanking everyone all over the place, I will leave it at that.

But, I do think we need to call it something bigger than a bookstall.

Pop-Up Bookshop, maybe. HartFest’s Mini-Hay, maybe. Any bright ideas are welcome.

So, all this hard work pays off – this year we made £962 and half goes to village charities and half to Oxfam ( who, between you and I ‘donate’ quite a lot of good quality books.)

I am not a competitive person but snapping at my heels is the necklace stall.

The idea came from a great woman in the village who thrown herself into village life with gusto (and thank the lord, relative youth.)

The idea is that most women have necklaces they have bought, don’t wear and don’t want – but some other woman will.

We, on the HartFest Committee were asked to see what we could raise in terms of necklaces through friends etc etc.

I showed myself to be the archetypal Sussex housewife by approaching my Pilates teacher to see if I could put a notice in her studio, my hairdresser for a notice in her salon, my book group and a group of friends who regularly lunch to salute one of our brilliant friends who has died.

Well, dear reader, sneery though I may be of my housewife credentials, they did good and we got lots and lots and lots of jewellery.

The sign I made for my hairdresser said:
Do you have any necklaces you don’t wear – of course you do!
So, if you could have a clear out of those beads you bought in the Accessorize sale and have ever worn since… Please think of us.
And we will take bracelets too – infact any old sparklies.

Rosie, my hairdresser reported that one of her clients had said to her,’ Oh I’d love to help, I have loads of necklaces I don’t wear but I don’t think any of them came from the Accessorize sale…’

Perhaps it was her who donated the sapphire and diamond ring. This is Deepest Sussex as I keep reminding you.

Anyway, I had nothing to do with the stall except for collecting carrier bags full of necklaces from my ‘sources’ but those who did, made a fantastic display of colour co-ordinated necklaces, silver ones polished to glint in the sunshine ( it was nearly sunny), an old birdcage draped with lovely sparklies – lovely all round.

And this, their first year, they made more than £500. And I have to say, a little disgruntedly, I am a woman who loves jewellery, and necklaces are a shed load easier to store and move than books.

Dear reader, I am in the wrong HartFest job.

Kites,Crows,Owls and Oxfam

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Well if it isn’t lambs it is birds as they might say in Deepest Sussex – if we knew anyone who was actually originated from Deepest Sussex.

We have a pair of kites living round here – no longer as rare as they were – but still a delight to watch soaring and sweeping around the back field.

They are not, in case you are not familiar with kites, small birds. Indeed the dog can look quite anxious and prey-like in certain lights.

But it is interesting to watch the corvids/crows/ravens mob them.

I should be more accurate on what type of corvids they are being a big fan of the book by Mark Cocker called ‘Crow Country.’

Amongst other fascinating stuff about corvids, It tells of the difference between crows and other corvids and explains that saying ‘if your see some ravens they are crows and if you see one crow it is a raven’ – or perhaps it is the other way round …..no, actually crows are sociable.

Anyway, these big kites are circling around looking for prey and out of the woods come the corvids and mob them – swooping around and chasing them off so the ‘poor’ kites heads off for the Downs.

The corvids are half the size of the kites but are quite determined and the kites seem either to be saying, ‘Bloody hell, is it harassment or what?’ or ‘Darling, shall we swoop up to the Downs and circle lazily round there and leave these rather plebeian types to their own thing?’

Whilst on the subject of predators, there is, what I think, is an owl box on one of our trees.

When I say ‘our’, I just mean trees we think of as ours in that they are on our horizon and are the two trees on the top of this blog – of course in fact, they are our landowner’s.

I am sure he knows what he is doing, and maybe the owls like a clear view of the catchment as it were – certainly it is not disguised or protected in any way and, as we say when one of us is washing up, ‘ don’t you think darling, it spoils the look of the tree?’

Remind me to tell you one day of the expensive bird box we put up which had been assiduously ignored by our birds who have then built their nests – insultingly – in the foliage alongside it.

Anyway, the Oxfam bookshop was open on Good Friday only from 10 till 3 so it was short shifts all round -and Joan was on the till in the morning, and I was on in the afternoon.

I had found a lovely book dating from 1941 which was sketches of children and although it was only worth about £3, I thought it was lovely enough to try it at £9.99.

Now Joan and I have a habit of me setting her a book-selling challenge on her shift. A big old bible ( but we had sold those before Easter), a Complete History of Fishing etc etc.

Essentially books I can’t find a place for anywhere else – I leave them on the counter and challenge Joan to sell them.

She looked at the book and although not usually a bibliophile, she was enchanted. That made me up the price to £12.99, and set her the challenge to sell it whilst I was out doing some errands.

In our cabinet – for expensive books (and vinyl as we now call records), was a set of three books called The Birds of Sussex.

(Should there ever be an avid reader of this blog with a good memory, they might recall than I found two of the the three volumes, which of course means they are worth a lot less, and then discovered the third volume under a pile of other stuff.)

Anyway, these books with gorgeous illustrations and I do mean gorgeous, had been in the cabinet for months and months. I was occasionally thinking of culling them and buying them to take home as they are so gorgeous – did I mention before how lovely they were ?

Anyway, (again) I got back from my errands, to find Joan in a high humour.

She had sold the book of children’s sketches – and sold The Birds of Sussex for a princely £100.

Because we were having a short day, I suggested we did not need to cash up once at lunchtime and then again at the end of the day as we usually do, but instead we could carry on through.

‘Oh not on your life,’ said Joan. ‘I am going to get the reading for this shift. You, Lucy, can eat my dust.’

And indeed I did.

I had a nice short shift with good weather and a holiday mood making customers smiley and generous, but no Sussex Birds for me.

Drought and Uncertainty

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Usually I am complaining in a rather martyred way about the amount of books I am clearing every shift at Oxfam, making it quite clear that there is a never ending flood of books that only I am holding back from swamping the shop.

Well, dear reader, it is course not just me by a long chalk – and what is more, at this moment, the flood has turned into a drought.

So, out the back of the shop where we pile the sacks for recycling it is usually just this side of chaos – this week was clear, blank, empty – even, hoovered!

I am not sure what to do with myself if truth be told. Usually whilst sorting books I am complaining ( in a rather martyred way) that I could get on with all sorts of other things to make our shop even more successful if only I didn’t have to empty another ten boxes of books.

But, I have sold the latest collection of erotica to the second-hand bookshop – Oxfam frowns on the idea of selling sex in the shops.

I have put the hobbies and crafts into order – now embroidery books are next to knitting, well away from DIY in a retro/pre-feminist move – and all the books you would ever, ever need to learn how to paint or draw are sitting with each other.

Religion has been sorted into world religions ( in groups, starting with Buddhism and moving alphabetically onwards) with all and sundry other stuff about crystals and angels and spaceship visitations attached on the end of the shelf.

(One day someone is going to buy the massive tome on Dreams and Their Interpretations. I think it may have been around in the shop, one way or another, longer than I have.

Occasionally, I find someone has moved it to the Academic section and, although it protests, I insist on moving it back to Esoteric.)

I have re-ordered the Old & Interesting into blocks of colour – all the blue books, the green books etc etc.

And every time you change the shelves – update, juggle, fiddle, change the front-facing books, you always get more interest in them.

There were two books – dating from the 1960s – about hunting in junk shops.

They have been out on the shelves for months and I was just about the cull them – short as we are of books, standards need to be maintained, or at least upheld more or less  and anyway, they didn’t find my colour-coding plan – when a customer fell upon them with delight. At £1 each she had a bargain and another two books were rescued from the recycling fate.

Someone came in looking for an ‘interesting’ golf book for her son. (Now to my mind there are very few interesting golf books – and all of those were written by P G Wodehouse.)

But such is the drought, that we had none – we who are usually knee deep in golf and cricket books – had none.

After a bit of thought, I persuaded her that a much better idea was the lovely (and it was lovely) hip-flask with St Andrew’s etched on it. Luckily, that was £7.99 of hip flask rather than the usual £2.49 of ‘how to improve your swing’ book.

Upstairs, my stock of book collections is also looking thin.

We still have the box on heraldry and chivalry – based on a generous donation of heraldry books supplemented with anything I can find with a knight on the front.

But we need a centrepiece for the window to go with it, and no one I asked had a suit of armour within their reach….

We have a plan to do a window on the birds and the bees ( no, not a way to sneak in sex) using a few of the lovely bee palaces my fellow volunteer sells. (www.beepalace.com)

But we are short on bee books. Bird books, even lovely ones, are two a penny but there is a shortage, not just of bees, but bee books.

We might have to broaden it out to pollinators and include butterfly books, bat books -hummingbird books at a pinch. But birds and pollinators does not have the same ring to it.

Our manager reckons it is uncertainty about the EU referendum which is causing this drought of donations.

I’m sure in the corridors of power, they are talking about the influence of uncertainty in the referendum, but I bet they are not taking the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield into account.

The Pop-Up Festivities Bookstore

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I may have mentioned before that I was volunteered by my best beloved to run the bookstall for the village festivities. Here I want to say that a) the ‘bookstall’ is a function room at the Legion hall, b) I spend, as you know, a lot of time sorting books at Oxfam so to come home and do it again for the village…..c) my best beloved who avowed his unstinting support, has been very busy on rehearsing for the (bloody) Pirates of Penzance.

So, having got the whinges out of the way, I am actually rather excited about tomorrow.

Thanks to very nice friends with a large dry barn, we had somewhere to put the books to get sorted. ( I am not sure anyone would have wanted to buy the 2002 edition of Who’s Who so along with quite a few others, it got sent to the recycling.)

My bee palace new friend was a star and spent many a (happy?) hour putting books into categories, and his wife was a font of all wisdom – having done it before.

I bribed and tarted around various local supermarket staff to get the requisite number of banana boxes in which to display the books and all was well.

Then we took them all – with helping hands – to a village hall to await their move to the Legion. (I am tempted to go on a riff about how surprised the French Foreign Legion in deepest Algeria, or somewhere, would be if they got the two boxes of old cricket books and the complete set of Penny Vincenzi hard back novels, but I won’t.)

At this point I had thought there would be a phalanx of young men to move them onwards. But it looked otherwise. And worried that a few middle-aged people would have to carry endless boxes of books around the corner and up the lane, I got worried.

So, in the pub on Friday, I asked any likely person ( as in under the age of 75) if they were free the following morning and could they? Would they? Etc etc.

And do you know what, we had those books moved in an hour. Hannah, who I had never met before, turned up with her dad’s wheel truck and, with Harry, the son of someone we know from the pub, moved a mountain of books. …..

I was expecting to be there all day so imagine my surprise when we were all done by noon.

And, I would like to say at this point, there were 91 banana boxes of books.

Then I made Sarah, the font of all wisdom, stay behind and help me count the boxes (for the record) and, and this is where I have to confess, to make a display of red-covered fiction books along the front of the stage.

In my defence, it makes it all look rather good.

Tomorrow we shall see whether all this adds up to a good sale.