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?”