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sually involved a hectic itinerary where i d walk miles visit several museums and galleries and sometimes visit a nearby city my wife sometimes commented that i was trying to squeeze a week s holiday into 48 hours and i suppose she was right i like to get value for money after seven years of exploring european cities they have slightly blended into a montage of modern art galleries tramlines cathedrals and museums i ve been to so many museums of communist oppression i can no longer tell one torture chamber from another i think this cartoon perfectly sums it up one thing i learned is that a trip is far better if you know someone there not only do you have the advantage of their local knowledge but you also have fun far more fun than travelling alone ever brings visits to strasbourg helsinki morocco and budapest were made doubly enjoyable by the company i had now that i m entering the winter of my life at this point my wife rolls her eyes at my maudlin expression i can t help asking myself how many good years i have left my parents looked forward to travelling when they retired but ill health rendered them virtually housebound i m determined to make hay while the sun shines my instagram account shows a life of travel concert going and seeing friends but of course the reality is that 90 percent of my time is spent at home shopping at tesco cooking meals loading the dishwasher unloading the dishwasher and putting the bins out i spend too long on my phone and watch far too many youtube videos i do read as much as i can but my inclusion on lists of book bloggers always felt vaguely fraudulent i used to enjoy blogging but being fundamentally lazy it was much easier to write posts when i had an endeless source of amusing book covers disgarded photo albums and strange ephemera i could intend to write a post about 1950s children s adventure books only to find myself going on a tangent about something i did seven years ago sometimes the posts seemed to amuse a few people and that was very gratifying this post isn t amusing but i hope it s been vaguely interesting to anyone who followed the blog in the past and that s all i have to say really thank you for reading this far posted by steerforth at 2 17 pm 13 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday february 16 2022 cold comfort farms ten years ago i was working on a farm in the middle of a cold sussex winter trying to push some huge metal wheelie bins up an ice covered slope after falling over several times i gripped onto the bins as firmly as possible only to discover that my hands had stuck to the freezing metal it was not the best of times there were lighter moments occasionally we d stop for a cup of tea and see how long it took for the dregs of our cups to freeze once we d tipped them on the ground meanwhile in a nearby barn some mice had taken the used teabags from our makeshift bin and turned them into a cosy little nest i barely knew the people i worked with but the grim siberian labour camp conditions created a sort of camaraderie when friends asked me what i was doing i told them a half truth i was setting up an online secondhand bookselling business with a man called pete if they wanted to imagine a rarefied atmosphere of antiquarian books that was fine with me the reality was harder to explain and i m not sure i even understood it myself it had all happened by chance a few weeks earlier i d been approached by someone i vaguely knew who d heard that i d recently left an online bookselling job to set up my own business pete invited me to a local pub and over a pint of harvey s produced a succession of excel spreadsheets that showed how the two of us could make our fortune my bookselling experience combined with his business acumen would be he argued be a winning combination i wasn t convinced but it was flattering to be asked and after all what did i have to lose pete proposed that we ran two separate but linked businesses so i would still have the independence i needed but with a guaranteed supply of books i mulled it over that evening and said yes the following morning the farm was 10 miles away in the middle of the sussex countryside and was owned by a gypsy family for reasons i never fully understood they all seemed to be called billy and lived in a static home which was occasionally turned 90 degrees to the right or left perhaps as a homage to their nomadic past pete had sublet a barn from the family and had established a small business selling penny paperbacks but had no idea what to do with all of the older non barcoded books my role was to go through the stock sort out the wheat from the chaff and find a way of selling the books online i d already done this in my previous job so what could possibly go wrong i soon had my answer several weeks of sifting through books ridden with mouse droppings in subzero temperatures took its toll and i developed pneumonia i hadn t taken it that seriously until i saw the look on my doctor s face after she d tested my lung capacity it was time to stop the rest of february was a write off spent mostly in bed by the beginning of march i felt able to go back to work and found pete in an ebullient mood he had just bought a large van which meant that we could move our stock around between different premises all i had to do now was find a suitable location for my part of the business how did one go about finding suitable properties to set up an internet bookselling business i had no idea but like any sensible person i tried google and eventually found this after my spell in the icy gulag the new site felt like paradise the owner was a gentleman farmer whose wife ran a b b for visitors to glyndebourne and his other tenants included the official glovemaker to the queen every time i opened the door i felt of rush of pleasure as i looked at the view i could have quite happily spent my days sitting in this empty building just looking at the view and listening to music if only such jobs existed sadly there was rent to pay so i had to start focusing on the nuts and bolts of the business literally it took two weeks to assemble the giant meccano sets masquerading as shelving units one nut and bolt at a time it was indescribably tedious and if someone had told me that i d have to disassemble it and reassemble it somewhere else six months later i might have felt like giving up along with the shelving there was the other minutiae to consider postage computers printers furniture setting up a bt account banking and stationery even something as simple as a packing slip required html skills that were way beyond my abilities but somehow i had to learn gradually it was beginning to take shape but there was one thing missing staff fast forward to a month later and it was impossibly idyllic i was working in a beautiful rural setting with two postgrads and a member of the cast of the archers which added to the bucolic atmosphere we spent our days sorting through old books in a cosy little office accompanied by the soothing strains of a french classical music station what more could anyone want sadly it was too good to last our business generated a lot of waste and our landlord had made it very clear that he didn t want his b b guests disturbed by the sight of wheelie bins or woken up by any early morning waste collections i couldn t argue with that if i was in the land of nod after a night s gotterdammerunging i wouldn t want a dawn chorus of attention this vehicle is reversing so far i d managed to use pete s van to take our unwanted books away but that took two hours out of my day also pete s bargain van was rather erratic and without any warning things would suddenly stop working on one occasion i was driving to a warehouse in birmingham and discovered that the windscreen wipers weren t functioning i pulled over and texted pete got to turn back the wipers aren t working pete quickly replied is it raining i replied that it wasn t but it might start raining at some point in the journey in which case i d be in a bit of a pickle i think pete thought that i was being an old fuss pot the business model was simple enough we received bulk deliveries of old pre isbn books and sorted through them identifying any titles that might be worth selling it doesn t take long to learn which books have no value at all in the secondhand market things like everyday bibles old textbooks and victorian poetry anthologies or titles like little women reach for the sky and anything by walter scott sadly these books are sent off to be pulped as nobody wants them particularly the charities who have just sold them to us as a waste product if the books have nice covers they may have a future lining the shelves of some faux olde worlde pub but most will end up in places as unlikely as road surfacing material in a normal one tonne delivery anything up to 90 of the books end up being thrown away i resisted leaving my rural idyll for as long as possible but i had to face facts the business was generating too much waste for our genteel setting i had to find a new home for the books after a few fruitless weeks of searching online i found this it was as grim as it looks in the photo but it was big and cheap perfect for a growing business we could have as many wheelie bins as we liked and receive deliveries from articulated lorries however expecting my staff to work in a large barn particularly as the weather got colder was asking too much how could i provide them with a decent office space fortunately i had a brainwave i won t claim that my garden shed idea matched the splendour of our previous office but once i d installed decent lighting a couple of heaters and painted the inside a bright colour it was tolerable perhaps we might have been contented there but unfortunately things took a turn for the worse impressed by the size of the barn pete decided that he d like to set up a little sideline there and employed the first four polish men who responded to his gumtree advert they were perfectly pleasant individuals but had a penchant for drinking vodka in the morning once pawel and his chums had reached a suitable state of inebriation they would amuse themselves by performing stunts with a forklift truck those things can move a lot faster than you might imagine occasionally the forklift would almost crash into our office veering off seconds before impact to add insult to injury they played heart fm and on one occasion i had to listen to adele accompanied by the cry of a bull being sodomised by one of its stablemates in an adjacent barn it was at moments like this i wondered where i had gone wrong but in spite of my reservations the business worked the sales slowly but steadily grew as we added books to our inventory and received orders from all over the world having a global marketplace meant that even the most obscure book stood a reasonable chance of finding a buyer in a bookshop i strongly doubt that our 1920s book about uht milk production would have sold but online we found someone in uruguay who couldn t wait to read it after a year i thought i d developed a pretty good business model the overheads were low and the turnover was growing month by month but i hadn t foreseen that there would be a number of obstacles to our progress here are five of the worst 1 animals being a townie i was under the naive impression that we were the sole occupants of our barn but i soon learned otherwise from a robin s point of view our bookshelves were just a suitable place to build a nest when the eggs hatched we had to tread very carefully hoping that we wouldn t frighten the mother away from feeding her birds this meant that if any poor soul ordered a book near the nest i had to cancel the order of course i couldn t tell them why so i had to invent a vaguely plausible excuse and hope that our rating wouldn t suffer after a few weeks the birds flew away leaving several pecked soiled books as a souvenir of their visit the poor poles who worked in the open barn also had to contend with birds defecating on their computer monitors and keyboards which must have added insult to injury in addition to birds we shared our barn with amphibians but the most bizarre moment was when we saw a mink casually walk past with a rat in its mouth the moment it noticed us the mink jumped and let go of the rat seeing an opportunity the rat scuttled off into a narrow gap by the door and hid when we returned after the weekend we found the mink lying dead with its legs in the air next to it was a huge pile of rat droppings our uninvited guests may have thrown the occasional spanner in the works but overall they provided many comedic moments and i grew to love the absurdity of it i also cherished the moments when a robin would land a few feet away and patiently watch me unpack my deliveries perhaps he was hoping for a bookworm 2 couriers i thought i d set up a foolproof system rather than faffing around taking parcels to the nearest post office i d found a courier who would do all the hard work all we had to do was put the uk orders in one mailsack and international orders in the other then someone would come and collect them it all worked very well until the day nobody turned up after a number of unanswered phone calls i discovered that the company had gone bust they had several days worth of our orders in their warehouse and for the next few weeks i began each day issuing refunds and apologising to angry customers our rating dropped as a result and fewer orders came in which was probably just as well as there was nobody to collect them i learned my lesson and signed up to one of the biggest couriers in the country they went bust too 3 gravity for no discernible reason our meccano shelving units would occasionally collapse under the strain of our growing inventory of books the metal would buckle to the point where repairs were impossible it was very annoying gravity also nearly led to my premature demise when this teetering pile of boxes was delivered it looks harmless enough here but when this half tonne pallet was five feet above me on the back of a lorry wobbling menacingly i wasn t terribly happy about it the delivery driver didn t inspire confidence when he said looks as if it might fall off mate can you stand underneath and try and keep it steady like a fool i complied because i wanted to show that i was also a proper man just like him 4 suppliers like couriers suppliers can suddenly go into receivership without any warning even if that doesn t happen they may decide that my few hundred quid a month isn t enough of an incentive for them to bother separating their old books from the new preferring to sell them to a waste paper merchant 5 partnership business partnerships are tricky at the best of times pete and i were like del boy and rodney pete was a geezer and although i liked him personally i didn t agree with the way he avoided paying people to extend his credit occasi...