Too Long, Too Short and Mary Berry

 

“Have you got any longer needles, love?”

“Longer than what?”

“Well, longer than the short ones.”

“Okay, let’s have a look. I’ve got these ones.”

“Oh no, they’re much too long.”

“How about these, then?”

“But they’re too short.”
“What size did you want?”
“Well I need some that are longer than the ones I’ve got, but I don’t want them too long, but these ones are too short.”

“Can you see any here that are longer than the ones you’ve got?”

“Ooh, I don’t really know. You see the longer ones are longer than the short ones and the ones I’ve got are too short.”

I kid you not, this was a genuine conversation I had one day with a customer. She eventually left with a packet of needles and didn’t bring them back, so they must have been suitably longer than the short ones she already had.

I hope, by now, that the locals are getting used to my somewhat warped sense of humour. I always have a little chuckle to myself when I am able to bring my favourite quip out for an airing.

“Do you sell invisible thread?”

“Yes, it’s there on the shelf. Can’t you see it?”

And then there was the day when a customer walked in the shop and asked, “Do you have googly eyes?” I couldn’t resist saying, “Well not every day. Some days I’m okay.” Don’t you feel stupid when there is no answering smile or acknowledging laugh?  I think I probably have a reputation of being ‘that slightly strange, but presumably harmless, batty woman in the wool shop.'

 

Having Stitches has been my therapy over the last 3 ½ years and as a great man once said, “Find a job you love and you'll never have to work again.” However, having to physically be in the shop has curtailed a lot of home activities that I now have a lot less time for.  For example, baking.  Pre-Stitches, I used to bake several times a week. Now, I only get to do it occasionally. Don’t get me wrong – I still feed Mr PDP when he needs it, but some of the once-regular delicacies are filed in his long term memory and only feature on state occasions nowadays.

I was watching Mary Berry on TV last week and marvelling how she describes things like catering for dinner parties of 20 as being relaxing and ‘great fun’. I beg to differ.

She demonstrates ‘easy & quick’ recipes and has all her ingredients carefully weighed out ready into suitably-sized preparation bowls by her minions behind the scenes. It takes about 3 minutes to complete the preparation of her wonderful pudding, in her brilliantly clean, no clutter kitchen, which is the size of a small lecture hall, and then she pops her creation into her sparkly, shiny oven. She can then delegate all the resultant washing up to more minions who are happy to scrape out half a meal’s worth of gunge left in the bowl, (because TV chefs never scrape the bowl out), whilst she relaxes with a cuppa.

During a recent baking spree on my day off from Stitches, I couldn’t help comparing my experience to Mary Berry’s.

1.    Find recipe book and clear space on kitchen worktop.

2.    Scrape off previous blobs of cake mixture from page, then hunt down ingredients.

3.    Locate required ingredients at back of cupboard, ignoring expired sell by dates, whilst chucking out items whose sell by dates really couldn’t be ignored due to health & safety regulations.

4.    Dig out kitchen scales and laboriously weigh out everything, failing miserably to locate suitably sized prep bowls.

5.    Wipe down all kitchen surfaces again, which are now covered in flour dust and sugar fallout.

6.    Check which tins are required to bake fabulous creation in. “It needs a what?” “I’m sure I used to have one of those.”

7.    Down on knees, ferret in back of long-forgotten cupboard, drag out what looks and feels like right shape and size.

8.    Peer dubiously at neglected surface of said tin. Blow tentatively at it. Remove spectacles, wipe vigorously on tea towel. Replace spectacles.

9.    Accept guiltily that, yes, that peculiar marking on tin could well be rust.

10. Fill washing up bowl with hot, soapy water.

11. Root around under kitchen sink to find Brillo pad and rubber gloves.

12.  Scrub diligently at offending marks until satisfied that the danger to health and imminent trip to A & E department has been eliminated.

13. Rinse and dry tin.

14. Wash bowl and draining board to remove Brillo pad splashes and fallout.

15. Refer back to recipe. “Line tin.”  **Sigh**

16. Ferret about in kitchen drawer for greaseproof paper, locate pencil, draw round tin, now then …. where are those scissors?

17. Grease beautifully, painstakingly lined tin. Realise you need two of these.

18. Repeat.

19. Now do Mary Berry impression and tip everything into bowl, then mix.

20. Forget to preheat oven. Well, I’ve been a bit busy.

21. Place prepared creation into not so sparkly and shiny, but by now, preheated oven.

22. Stand back, look at mess in kitchen and piles of washing up in sink.

23. Reflect on how relaxing and ‘great fun’ it was.

24. Make determined resolution to get back into baking more regularly.

25. Recall how nice Asda ready made rhubarb pies are.

 Do you think I stand a chance of deputising for Mary Berry at all?

 

 

Two Flushes and Half a Kettle

You all know the joy of dealing with bureaucracy? When I first took over Stitches, I had the dubious pleasure of talking to lots of automated answering systems, “customer service colleagues” and various other frustrating, time-wasting facilities almost every day in order to get my services and utilities actioned. This was all made even more difficult by having to field the still-new concept of serving unfamiliar customers with sometimes unfamiliar products, with one ear to the “muzak” being channelled in and doing my best to look professional and knowledgeable at the same time. I’m still working on the last bit.

One of the issues I was trying to sort out was the fact that my water bill seemed to include two properties. I guessed this because there were two addresses, two standing charges and two lots of cubic meterage – see? I know the lingo as well.

When I rang to query this, needless to say it all got very complicated. The addresses being used on the bills were still the ones listed in Garstang’s Medieval Guide to Tourism, so it wasn’t helping that I was using the current addresses to try and sort it all out.
 

Trying to describe just how small my little emporium was and to impress on United Utilities that I really didn’t want to be paying for half the High Street proved to be getting us nowhere. Eventually the child young man on the other end of the line asked me how much water I was using per day. “About two flushes and half a kettle,” I said. This seemed to sway him a bit as it obviously wasn’t on his script or his well-thumbed training pack of customer responses.

He went away to find a grown-up who I could talk to and she suggested that they send me a nice map of the street which I could draw on in red pen to define my boundaries and I would then return it to her. I’ve never had to define my boundaries before and it wasn’t easy. I normally leave that sort of thing to Mr PDP who earns his keep admirably in that department.

That seemed to do the trick, although it turns out that my estimation of ‘two flushes and half a kettle’ was rather ambitious. To have the time and luxury of drinking that amount of tea and get to go to the loo twice in one day would be an extravagance indeed when the shop gets really busy. Happily, my bill was eventually adjusted accordingly. My neighbours now get to pay their own bills and mine comes to little more than the standing charge, or should that be a ‘sitting’ charge?

Whilst I’m on the subject, ever tried getting through to a human at BT? It would seem that it is a prerequisite of employees there to be as uncommunicative as possible whilst still hanging on to their post as advisors at a major communications providing company. They are very good at it.

It proved to be actually impossible to make contact with anyone telephone-related in the time gap between customers so I had to resort to phoning from home. This instantly created problems because they always presume you are phoning about the telephone line you are ringing from. Which I wasn’t. After several days, I’d swear they recognised my number and stopped answering my calls. I wasn’t asking for much and I don’t think I was being unreasonable. I just wanted them to stop sending me a quarterly bill as well as a monthly bill. Not too much to ask? Apparently, yes.

It took over 12 months and countless phone calls on an 0845 number to sort out my telephone bill. I cancelled my Direct Debit facility, which got their attention funnily enough, and refused to be intimidated by their threatening letters.

I eventually resorted to sending emails directly to one of the bosses, whose name and email address I managed to wangle out of an inexperienced Customer non-Care Services ill-Advisor who didn’t see me coming. After another excessive period of time, the BT boss and I declared a truce and came to an amicable agreement and between us we invented a novel idea.

1. BT would send me correct invoices at the correct intervals.

2. I would pay them.

See?   Simples.

Rottweilers and Kidney Stones

One of the mysteries of retail is the way people gather at street corners until there is a crowd, then all rush together so they pile into the smallest of shops en masse in order to fluster the shop staff. Okay, call me paranoid, and maybe they don’t actually do that, but it really would be a lot easier if customers would organise themselves so they enter the shop at regular intervals and then arrange themselves in different areas to browse. 

That way, we wouldn’t get undignified squabbling over the Baby Knitting Patterns and the Ladies Spring & Summer Designs file wouldn’t come apart so often through rough handling. The times I find myself crawling underneath the pull-out pattern shelves between peoples’ legs to retrieve baby wool for other customers are becoming far too frequent for a lady of my delicate years and it’s not a pretty sight, I can tell you.

I feel I am losing my touch. When I was Deputy Practice Manager of a medical centre in a not very salubrious area of Preston, I developed a certain assurance that, in the event of a riot, I would be able to react accordingly and implement crowd control procedures. That would usually involve placing the Receptionists in the front line then I could retreat to a place of safety – it worked well. 

I even encouraged Daughter #2 into the glamorous world of medical reception and she too gained a well-practised, qualified Rottweiler-impersonating ability to keep control of the front desk and the patients at bay.  I’m so proud! 

In a shop situation though, however much one would like a bit of organisation, it doesn’t do to discourage people by telling them to ‘go away if you don’t have an appointment’ because that rather defeats the object of putting things on display to entice them in, so it’s a quandary. 

I'll admit, it's been a bit of a challenge to retrain Daughter #2 to smile and welcome people and avoid fixing them with ‘the look’ that all doctor’s receptionists develop. Putting the customers down gently and not leaving teeth marks is proving a bit of a sticking point but she’s coming along nicely.

Fortunately for me, Daughter #2 was with me in the shop a couple of weeks ago when we had a bit of drama. I’d had a persistent pain in my side for a few weeks, (no, not the daughter), and had been informed by the GP, once I’d got past the Rottweiler on the front desk, that it was kidney stones but probably the gravel type which would take a while to pass through my system.

I kept going and figured that that if I could produce four babies with only the odd twinge of pain(!), I could soldier on and do my duty to the shoppers of Garstang. However, on this particular market day, my kidney gravel waited until I was in the furthest corner of the stock room upstairs looking for camels, (see previous post) no …. I wasn’t. Everything in my stock room is in plastic bags so periodically build up to small avalanches which then slowly and gracefully slide to the floor or hit me on the back of the head whenever I’m up there. I was sorting out the unruly 4 ply wool when a massive pain shot through me. Unable to move without further pain I called to Daughter #2 to close the shop door and turn the key then come and rescue me.

The priority was to try and get downstairs to safety and possibly an ambulance, but I can tell you, 18^th century staircases in stone cottages were not designed to allow for two people to manoeuvre at a time. I’m not quite sure how we managed it, but to cut a long story short, I got a blue light ride to Royal Preston and priority admission via A & E.  We won’t dwell on the attitude of the young doctor, about whom Mr PDP remarked in his best diplomatic manner that he ‘looked like he was on study leave for his GCSEs’.

Many hours later I was invited to partake of the NHS hospitality for a couple of days and they moved me to a surgical ward. They’ve upgraded the beds nowadays to electronic gismos that raise/lower/adjust various bits of you at a touch of a button, if you get the right button, that is. You could end up catapulted off the end altogether with very little effort if you weren’t careful. You just have to make sure you’re not near an open window when you’re fiddling with the controls.

But, I was kept very happy and high during my stay, on just about every painkiller known to modern man which they thrust at me with amazing regularity and offered extra if needed. Even so, I definitely do not recommend kidney stones as a means to some time off work, and hopefully the experience will not be repeated.

Bra Hooks and Camels

Ladies! We all know how many hooks are on our bra fastenings, right? 

(Gentlemen please avert your eyes for a moment). 

Well apparently not. I sell three options of bra extensions – narrow 2 hook, wide 2 hook and wide 3 hook. Now, without checking would you know which one you needed?

A couple of summers ago, (I know it wasn’t last year because we didn’t get a summer), I had the shop door open so I could benefit from the fresh Fylde air and the High Street traffic emissions. I had a lady wanting to purchase a bra extender due to M & S’s lingerie designs being more suited to those who were last in the queue rather than the ones who got the lion’s share of curves when they were being given out.

 I showed her the three options and without any warning or reversing alarms, the lady quickly turned her rear view to me and whipped up her top whilst giving the instruction, “Just see what I’ve got on will you?”

 I swiftly moved to the door to shut it and put myself between the flashing lady and the unsuspecting public. After all, I hadn’t been in charge of Stitches for long at that stage and I didn’t want to lower the tone so soon in my career. (Plenty of time for that later). I felt sure that Mr PDP wouldn’t have let me loose in retail if this sort of thing was going to happen.

When I had stopped laughing, I exclaimed, “Really Madam! We are not that sort of shop!” She was unabashed, very cheery and so happy that she had located the correct item to relieve the pressure on her person, she bought three.

A popular question on entering the shop is, “I don’t suppose you sell ……..?”  Now, I consider this a personal challenge and generally I think I can answer “Yes, I do” about 85% of the time. It’s not easy to keep up a good track record though when asked, “I don’t suppose you sell camels do you?”

In fact, I think it is very unfair and quite unsporting to even ask that sort of question and expect an affirmative answer. Camels? This is Garstang. Why would I sell camels?

Now if only they’d asked for cows, sheep, hens, chicks, roosters, ducks, horses, sheepdogs, goats, Highland Cattle, turkeys, llamas, donkeys, elephants, monkeys, pigs, frogs, cats, foxes, penguins, mice, pandas, aardvarks, (how do you spell that?), lions, alligators, hedgehogs, zebras, badgers, foxes, moles, otters, rabbits, koala bears, butterflies, snails, tigers, dormice, giraffes, weasels, toad, squirrels, beavers, tortoises, hippos or dolphins, I would have been able to oblige. 

But camels? …… oh hang on … what’s that I see lurking behind that monkey? 

Oops, a camel. 

I really must clean up more often then I wouldn’t lose things.

I feel bad now that I took the hump about it all.

Open All Hours and Lost Wives

My modest frontage extends to a rather ample rear, (we are talking shop proportions here, in case you were wondering), and the whole area is effectively now my play pen. I am surrounded every day by all the things I have loved to do previously as hobbies and now I get to play with everything.

I feel I am in a world where people understand me. Several times a week I get folk wandering in off the street - honestly, you’d think it was a shop sometimes - just wanting a ‘fix’. They want to look and feel, pick up fabric and stroke it and even squeeze the wool and then maybe wander out again feeling so much the better. Fortunately for my extremely nice bank manager, most people upgrade and become actual customers and buy things. Mr PDP says I’m like a drug dealer, encouraging people to feed their crafting habits. “Yes,” I say, “But at least I supply clean needles!”

I’m getting very good at my Arkwright impression, (the shopkeeper from ‘Open All Hours’) and have virtually perfected the art of drawing in unsuspecting members of the public, who only came in for a reel of black thread to sew a button on and can’t even knit, and persuading them that they really can’t survive without the latest new craze of wooliness. They leave the shop clutching their bulging designer Stitches carrier bag looking rather bemused and confused, having completely forgotten to buy their black thread anyway but daren’t come back for it in case they get ensnared by the mad woman once more and won’t be allowed to leave.

Every day I have the privilege of meeting the nicest type of customers anyone could wish to meet. I frequently get complimented on the nice smell in the shop, (courtesy of an Airwick plug-in), and hear so many nice comments about my little ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ - very often by the people who just come in for their fix but don’t buy anything, but we’ll gloss over that bit - and a favourite phrase is ‘My goodness, you sell everything here!’  My usual response of “Well, I’m short of nothing I’ve got and if I’ve not got it, it’s half-price” is met with varying degrees of understanding and reaction, depending on how well developed their sense of humour is.

Another regular occurrence, (yes, honestly), is the abandoned husband who has suddenly realised that he has either gone deaf or recently misplaced his wife. He wanders up the high street for a while then decides that the best option of being reunited with the prospect of his evening meal would be to investigate the wool shop as that’s where she’s likely to be. He’ll lurk outside for a few seconds, peer in through the window of the door, then carefully open the door whilst surreptitiously checking round that he will not be recognised by anyone who knows him, (because, as everyone knows, no male would be seen dead in the wool shop). “Is my wife in here?” Now I’m good, but I’m not that good. Unless his wife had previously revealed her marriage certificate or photo i.d. to me, I’m not going to be 100% certain which of my customers he married 40 or 50 years ago.

If, by chance, the shop is empty when he comes in, he will still ask the same question then walk right to the back and check to make sure I’m not holding her hostage under the stairs.  After craning his neck to look up the stairs which clearly state ‘Private, Staff Only’, just in case she’s moonlighting, he will go to leave the shop and with his hand still on the handle he’ll say, “You didn’t see which way she went did you?”

How It All Began

“Can you just measure my fly, love – I need a new zip …..”

 This was an opening gambit from an elderly gentleman whom I had never met before when he wandered into my shop looking helpless and slightly bewildered. As propositions go, it could have been better. I side-stepped the awkwardness, I thought, by waving my tape measure (which does not have a discreet solid end section such as gentlemen’s tailors use for inside leg measurements) in the general direction of his trouser area and said confidently “ah yes, this zip here will be fine, I’m sure”.

Then there was a similar occasion when I was trapped against the button stand with a non-too-savoury aromatic workman wanting me to check whether his trouser button was black or brown. I feel that chat up lines aren’t what they used to be in this part of the Fylde and it can be quite a challenge to diplomatically extricate myself and flee to the safety of the front of the shop with my counter between me and said customer.

Life in a wool, sewing & haberdashery shop isn’t as staid and ordinary as it might seem. It isn’t all safe and stable Grannies wanting to knit baby wool in pink, blue or white. Indeed no. Sometimes other people come in and demand bright red and navy, oranges and lime greens just to see if they can shock me, but I tell them “You can’t scare me – I have grandchildren!”

I set up in Stitches, my wool shop, about 2 ½ years ago. I’m still not quite sure how it happened. Mid-life crisis perhaps. We had been out one Saturday night about 3 years ago, can’t remember where ‘cos I’m not normally allowed out in the evenings, and when we came back I had a sudden urge to Google ‘Craft shops for sale in Lancashire’. Literally, it was as random as that, and completely out of the blue. Five minutes into my search and I found the shop that I used to frequent as a customer was for sale. “Look at this,” I said to the long-suffering Mr PDP, “My shop is for sale!” To his credit, he was very discreet with his eye-rolling and even tried to sound enthusiastic and interested. Deep down, he was probably feeling ‘oh no, what now?’

Because we live in a technological age, it was a matter of moments to send off an email requesting details and asking for an appointment to view. If I’d had to take the time and effort to write a letter instead, sanity would probably have kicked in and common sense would have prevailed. As it was, the very next week found us in the company of an extremely nice bank manager who should have known better than to encourage me in such a venture, and the rest, as they say (whoever they are), is history.

Stay with me and I'll share the comings and goings of the innocent inhabitants of a market town near you ........