You are allowed to enjoy this…

So let’s not beat about the bush. Christmas is a miserable time. So much pressure to have a good time, to buy the right presents, to spend lots of money, to make sure that everyone is well fed, etc. There’s so much emphasis on Christmas that I believe that this somehow increases the statistical chances of something going wrong. In our case, not only are we running a busy shop, but my mother got taken ill on Christmas Eve. Thinking it was just a cold, she got an emergency appointment at the village health centre and go prescribed steroids and antibiotics. The pills failed to work and she took to her bed, missing out on the Christmas dinner I had cooked for her on the big day.
There was no improvement Boxing Day and so on 27th we called for the doctor again, who visited the house and said: “You are going to hospital”. And so an ambulance arrived a couple of hours later and mother was taken away, delirious and gasping for oxygen. A couple of hours later I received a call from the hospital asking for the next of kin. I’d been this place before and so I naturally thought that her time had come and emotionally prepared myself for the worst.
Thankfully, she wasn’t dead but hooked up to a ventilator and heavily sedated. The nurses couldn’t (or wouldn’t) comment on her condition and so it was a stressful 24 hours. Days later, she has pulled through and is well enough to come out of the Critical Care Unit and be put on a regular ward. Meanwhile, we were a worker down in the shop and so myself and The Missus had to make up for my missing mother, who is frankly the key to the operation, as she gives us breathing space to do things like look after baby Verity, go to the bank and other business related stuff.
So we opened Boxing Day and New Year’s Day and we did it. Myself and The Missus pulled it off on our own (with some help, of course, from our regular morning worker). So I sit here slightly frazzled thinking that a whole new year extends before me and that this time next year I will be even more exhausted. So be it. That’s the forfeit of an honest day’s work.

I’ve not posted any music videos on here for a while, so here’s Tony “King of the Bottom End” Levin with this quirky little number.

Good job George Michael didn’t wander into that particular restroom, eh?

One of the things life has taught me is to never look back. Keep moving forwards and if you do need to look over your shoulder to remember things that have past, make it a brief glimpse. Looking back always makes me feel a little miserable – I don’t know why, it just does. With the recent move (wow was it really September?), I’ve done my best to ignore the good memories of Brady Avenue and our sweet little house and focus on the stonking huge place I have now, which I dispise because it doesn’t particularly feel like a home – that’s because it is has a dual function. Anyhoo, a little birdy told me that the person who bought our old place has turned it into a building site and has been busy ripping the guts out of it. That was to be expected because it seems that with the advent of all these property development shows on the TV, everyone wants to make a quick buck and the easiest way of doing this is to invest in property and “modernise”.
I knew this would happen with my old place, but it is the little things that cause a pang of regret and sorrow. Like I knew that the tree that had stood in the front garden, the one that had been planted when the house was originally built and had lived a mighty 50+ years – the only tree left in the road – the tree that was “protected” by a restrictive covenent on the deeds to our home – has been cut down. I always get sad when trees are cut down for no real reason other than them being an incovenience. I knew it would happen with the one at Brady Avenue, but I was hoping that the restrictive covenent would some how protect said tree. Nope.
Anyway, from what I’ve heard from my contact back in the old country, it sounds as if Mr K is doing exactly what I thought he would do and put a couple of driveways into both our old properties. One of the bugbears of living at Brady was that despite owning two properties there and only having one modest motor vehicle for transport, it was getting increasingly difficult to park in our own road. Parking problems is something you associate with central London but we were beginning to experience it as most families have more than one car and these small roads just cannot support that amount of vehicles. Also, some folks seemed to be attracted to our road, park up and walk to their homes around the corner. Anway, to stop babbling, on more than one occasion The Missus was forced to park in the next road or two roads away.
With two driveways being installed down that little road, it will create parking chaos and, if anything, that shall be my legacy of moving away. You see, people are predictable and it was obvious that anyone buying our old properties would see parking was a premium and that a private driveway would be the way to go. I bet all those people who used to park down that road with their multiple vehicles are cursing us for moving on, but that’s progress for you.
(This entry was written whilst waiting for a large application to download via the Internet)

This is my current desktop background at the moment. Oh my god, I’ve turned into a soppy parent! Arrrrrgggggghhhhh!!!! Is there no hope for me?

Mind you, little Verity is cute as a button, isn’t she?

One of the thing about running a newsagents is that we have a certain clientelle that require their money to be collected from them. These are invariably the elderly who can no longer sprint down to the shops and I have given the role of cash collector to my grey-haired mother, who is very good at dealing with that generation of people. Plus it certainly beats having a 6′ bloke knocking at your door asking for money, which might come across as a little intimidating.
Anyway, we have a book of customers who have their money collected on a fortnightly basis and one of these customers has been a little problematic. The first time my mother visited the person took the receipt ticket and said that they would come down to the shop and pay. OK. No problem there. However, when she’s returned they’ve claimed to have paid the bill because they have the receipt ticket (the one they nabbed on her first visit). We discussed the issue in the shop and it was obvioust that this customer was going to be difficult, so I asked my mother not to go back there again. She had other ideas though and wanted to know when the lady named on the receipt was actually going to be at home and would try to get the money direct from her. When she arrived at the address, the porch door was open so she stepped inside and rang the doorbell. The man of the house appeared and all seemed normal, him telling my mother that his wife would be home at 6pm. Then all hell broke loose with the guy accusing my mother of trespassing and him physically pushing her (with her a slight woman at 62-years-old and 5 foot nothing) out of the porch.
So when I heard about this I stopped their newspapers and vowed that they’d not get anymore. No one assaults my mother over an unpaid bill and gets away with it. On Saturday, I expected them to arrive and the woman (who was never at home) did and I didn’t like her tone one bit when she began complaining and running down my mother. Of course, I stood there and did my concerned shopkeeper bit. You know, you nod your head, you agree and you let the customer think they they are right even though you know that they are lying through their teeth. I said that we’d clear the bill as a mark of good faith and leave it at that. But that wasn’t enough, the woman was threatening to involve the police as my mother had trespassed on their property and then there was the usual sob story: her husband is disabled and has angina and what if he’d had a heart attack. They also crowed that if it had been a man and not a woman, the husband would have hit them. Nice people…I don’t think.
You can always tell a bullshitter because they will rely on any disability as an advantage to get the higher ground. So I stood there and listened and told them to involve the police because if the incident was that serious it should be investigated…yadda…yadda…yadda, because that’s what you do when you deal with bullshitters, you bullshit them back. And so I got them calmed down and to leave the shop. With me nearly £20 down on the business and mother facing police action for “tresspassing”.
Well it turns out that these people used to run up bills of over £90 with the previous owners and was put on the collection round because of their tardiness at paying. Well that’s one customer I won’t have to worry about anymore. Luckily, for us, for every customer that cancels their papers (and there have been a couple for various reasons, mainly moving house) we’ve had three more sign up: so I see it as good riddance to bad rubbish. The problem though, when dealing with the public, is that while 99% of folk are honest, genuine decent folk, there’s that one percent that will try and fuck you up. I’ve put this one down to experience.
Meanwhile, someone wrote me a big cheque and it bounced all the way home from the bank. When confronted with the unpaid cheque, those concerned where the opposite, unconcerned. I’m very wary of people who don’t know how to pay their own way. One chance has been used up, I shan’t let it happen again.

Today, rising at 5am, bringing in the newspapers and magazines, sorting the newsrounds and opening the shop for 6am. I have been trying to shake off a cold for what seems like forever. Yesterday, late evening, a customer was telling my mother how running a newsagents will kill you, just as I wandered into earshot. “Thanks for that!” I replied in my cheery demeanour. The fellow had actually worked in our shop many years previously and had been involved in newsagency for a while. “The stress will kill you,” he said as he left. And again I thanked him.
So this morning I had my breakfast at about 6.30am, the shopwork covered by my two staff. Porridge was on the menu and as I felt the last drops of the oaky conglomeration sliding down my digestive track, I felt a familiar pain. It was the stomach cramps. Wowser, these were stronger and more painful than ever before. I quickly took some peppermint oil tablets and a couple of ibuprofen and retreated to back, curling myself in a foetal position to numb the waves of gripping pain. I managed to drift into a sleep and had a fever dream where someone came into the shop and told me that the consensus of the village was that they wanted us to leave town. I grabbed said dream man by the neck and ejected him without ceremony.
I am thinking that maybe these stomach cramps are linked to stress, perhaps? The worst period of them was when I had a proper full-time and was particularly miserable. Coincidence maybe? Well I am currently worrying about the THOUSANDS of POUNDS that are owed to me by the village. You see, around these parts it seems perfectly natural for people to receive their newspaper delivery but not pay for it.
“But I demand a reminder, because I need to know how much I owe you,” they bleat.
They got a reminder at the beginning of the week when I sent out bills to every customer who hadn’t paid since the 1 October. I included a nice letter explaining how they could pay and that if they didn’t settle up in a timely manner it might affect their newspaper delivery. What else could I do. Some folks owe over £50 on their newspaper bill… Some folk didn’t like this last sentence, this threat, if you will. But how else can you encourage someone to pay what they owe. If they haven’t paid in nearly eight weeks maybe I should just let them have the papers for free? Anyway, I watch as the cash comes in dribs and drabs. Next week, a big bill needs to be paid and the money I am owed will go someway to pay it.
And so I continue to worry and wonder if I have done the right thing by buying into this business. So maybe it wasn’t that big a surprise that I had bad stomach cramps this morning. Somehow I need to learn not to worry and love my debt.
As the guy in the shop said: “Stay in this business for too long and it will kill you…”