Tea and Cake – British Penicillin

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I’m feeling creative again. Sloth and low temperatures put me out of the game for a bit, but an extra layer of clothing, a little heat and some reading has put me back in there. Mainly the reading. After a lazy month and a few weeks of experiments with hibernation I opened up Blithe Spirit when it arrived yesterday and felt something happen. Sparks danced from synapse to synapse and ideas seeped from cell to cell. Ideas appeared and if my life was an early Disney cartoon, bluebirds would have flown around my head.

It wasn’t just the reading of course. I have a couple of tanka and a haibun in there. They will appear here in due course. There’s nothing like seeing yourself in print for getting you going again.

We had a delivery from a charity shop yesterday and one of the lots is around 250 envelopes addressed to the Elvis Presley Fan Club. The main Presley man in the UK in the 60s was a man called Albert Hand. He only lived about ten miles outside Nottingham and this was a selection of empty envelopes he must have either kept or given to a local stamp collector. It’s an interesting lot and it enabled me to open the sales by asking “Are you lonesome tonight and wondering what to bid on eBay?”

Botham’s Whitby

It’s not quite ready for going live yet, but if say I managed to get another half dozen song titles in you will get the idea of the good humour, not to mention puerile glee, that filled the shop this afternoon. Unfortunately, none of the envelopes have been marked “Return to Sender”.

Meanwhile, customers continue to be irritating. One has refused to collect a package from his local post office in the US and it will soon becoming back to us. eBay will, of course, take his side because they always side with the customer, and we will lose the £15 postage fee. Another is claiming that his parcel hasn’t been delivered, despite the fact it was delivered and paid for a month ago. We will win that case as we have proof of delivery, but why should we have to spend time proving it? Time is money and in the case of a £20 sale the profit probably isn’t worth the time we spend on it.

To lift my mood I will post more pictures of tea and cake. Tea and cake can be very uplifting.

Tea and Eccles Cakes at Bempton Cliffs

 

14 thoughts on “Tea and Cake – British Penicillin”

  2. Lavinia Ross

    For some reason I cannot open up the Blythe Spirit link, but I congratulate you on the publication!

    You get some interesting things cone through the shop. No “Return to Sender”? That is unfortunate! 🙂

    Tea is a wonderful thing all on its own, and coupled with a good cake, I sure does cure many ills.

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  3. arlingwoman

    The cakes are amazing. I have to tell you, here in the US between delivery services and the USPS, it is entirely possible for something to have been delivered and to the wrong address. It happened with my niece last year. The people who received it drove it to her. It happened last summer at my building with a package of Wagyu beef my neighbor was told had been delivered and it had–to my hallway, not hers in the next building. I have other examples–packages I have walked down the courtyard or across the block. As for not picking it up from the PO, not sure what’s going on with that one. It’s got to be frustrating business shipping things.

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    1. quercuscommunity Post author

      Yes, I admit that things do go wrong, like our parcel to Slovakia that ended up in Japan, or the box returned as “damaged” which had quite clearly been cut open and robbed by an employee of the delivery company. But generally we find that customers cause more problems than the delivery companies. 🙂

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    1. quercuscommunity Post author

      Thank you. We are going to load the Presley memorabilia auction in a few days – if we load it now people will be too busy with Christmas to bid. We are cunning like that . . .

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