What's your excuse?

You may or may not know that I am one of those irritating people that jump in front of you with a clip board and a cheery grin in attempt to stop you shopping and sell you something! Probably the most competitive and fiercely fought arena in the direct selling game is energy - gas and electricity that is. For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I currently find myself attempting to impede shopper’s progress within the mighty Marks and Spencer emporia in an effort to lure them away from their present energy supplier so that I can gain myself a pound or two to spend on wine and a good time! Fortunately for my colleagues and me, we are considered to be at the top of the tree in utility sales with sales persons from all of our competitors queuing to jump ship and join us.

Spending eight to ten hours on your feet spouting the same mantra time and time again can be a little boring, so we often indulge in little games to lighten the mood between sales pitches. Our favourite pastime is to list the most frequently used excuses we hear when people wish to avoid being stopped. We make a bet on which we think will be the most used phrase that day and put ticks against a list which we keep under the counter!

I thought you might like to view the current chart positions of the most used excuses and see where you fit into our top ten!

10. You are all the same. Ok so there is not a lot to choose between us but we are hardly going to admit it and we really are very nice people.

9. I’m happy where I am. Under the false impression they have the best deal

8. Sorry, I’m in a hurry. You see them accelerate as soon as you make eye contact!

7. I could do with some energy! The favourite quip of elderly people with walking difficulties who think we’ve never heard it before!

6. I’ll come back tomorrow. Oh yea!

5. I'm on my lunch break. Probably the only valid reason for not stopping we hear -assuming that is that they are in fact on a lunch break.

4. Too much hassle. Our system is hassle free whilst most are not, so it’s understandable that some people believe it to be. If only they’d listen...

3. Got to get back to my car before the meter runs out. I always offer to pay for another hours parking just to see what they say!

2. I've got a credit card thanks. The second most popular reason to rush on by, even though we are not selling credit cards! Remarkable since we stand in front of an enormous display unit clearly advertising our product!

1. My husband / wife / partner deals with it. By far the most used excuse which falls apart when a few minutes later they walk past together and have to find a different excuse!

The other things we look out for are the visible yet silent actions people take to avoid talking to us. It really is terribly funny and blatantly obvious.These are the most used four.

4. Look at their wrist watch as they walk past

3. Take a diversion just before they reach us then pop out again a few metres further on!

2. Look over their shoulder as they approach (and invariably bump into someone!)

1. Press a cell phone to their ear and pretend to be having a conversation.

Fortunately a lot of people do engage us in conversation, in fact half a million folk have come on board since we launched 10 months ago making us the biggest success story in the industry. Most are polite, many are unbelieving and quite a few are downright rude. But the vast majority who take the time to listen do sign up and invariably come back and thank us a few weeks down the line, and that makes it all worthwhile.

So, what’s your excuse?

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when autumn leaves start to fall

Words not necessary! Click on images to enlarge them

To see these photos in far higher quality visit my Images site by clicking HERE

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Treat yourself to a couple of minutes of Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves!

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It's Sunday Scribblings time again and the prompt is Adventure. I suppose that going out on a cold October night 'trick or treating' is quite an adventure for most kids. My kids however had a far deeper and darker motive! Enjoy!

Part one

It was a cold night in October. In the narrow street, nothing stirred but for a black cat which meandered along the road pausing occasionally with one paw raised, ears pricked, listening. It stopped opposite a run-down terraced cottage, turned its head toward the door, arched its back and hissed.

The stillness was broken by a gaggle of laughing children which appeared from a side street calling out ‘trick or treat’ and banging on doorways. There were about ten of them, all dressed for Halloween night. The girls wore witches gowns of red purple and blue, their eyes black and their lips scarlet. The boys had whitened faces and grey cloaks which dragged behind them on the ground. The black cat looked on, motionless.

One of them, a small boy wearing a black cloak and a grotesque monster mask ran up to the terraced cottage and shouted ‘this is the one’. The black cat turned and ran in the opposite direction. He banged on the door with the handle of his axe then pulled a hood over his head. The others gathered around him giggling excitedly.

The terraced cottage belonged to Billy Brown. He'd moved there several years ago. No one knew much about him. They never knew him as Billy ‘Bully’ Brown. As a child in school he’d terrorised his fellow pupils. He was moved from one school to another then eventually to an institution for young offenders. His bullying continued later in life when he was feared by even the most hardened of criminals in London’s gangland. But eventually it all backfired on him and he was forced to flee and go into hiding as an anonymous resident of the village.

The boy banged on the door again. Nothing. Bang, bang.

Suddenly a voice yelled a voice from inside the cottage. ‘Go away’

The boy banged again and again. Suddenly the door swung open and there was Billy Brown, his face like thunder, brandishing a base ball bat.

Part 2

‘Trick or treat?’ said the hooded boy quietly. ‘Trick or treat?’

The children still were smiling, but their faces were no longer angelic. Instead they had turned ghostly white and their mouths ran with crimson blood. They stared straight up into Billy’s eyes. His expression changed and a look of fear came over his face.

They started chanting, very slowly, very softly, almost in a whisper.

‘Trick or treat? Trick or treat?’

He dropped the bat.

‘Trick or treat?’ they said, their voices becoming a little louder. ‘Trick or treat?’

The boy took a step towards him.

‘Trick or treat Billy?’ he said looking up into his ashen face. Billy took a step back shaking his head from side to side. The children moved towards him and he started to shuffle back into his hallway.

‘Trick or treat? Trick or treat?’ their voices grew louder and louder. ‘Trick or treat? TRICK OR TREAT?’ The children were now shrieking and the noise echoed and bounced around inside Billy’s head.

They crept forward, he stumbled back and then he came to a sudden stop when he backed into a wall.

‘Trick or treat?’ they screamed ‘TRICK OR TREAT BILLY BULLY BROWN?’

Billy pressed his hands over his ears and screwed closed his eyes. Suddenly the children fell quiet. Total silence. You could hear a feather drop.Something yanked one of his hands away. He tried to resist but he was helpless. He felt warm breath on his ear.

‘School’s out Billy’ said a deep voice from an inch away. He slightly opened one eye and jumped as he came face to face with a hooded man in a grotesque mask carrying an axe. The children stared up at Billy, their huge eyes boring into his. They each had both arms rigid, pointing up at his terrified face. They started chanting again, softly at first, then rising to a deafening crescendo.

‘School’s out, school’s out, SCHOOL’S OUT.......’ They started stabbing their fingers at him. ‘SCHOOLS OUT.......SCHOOLS OUT’. Their screaming was unbearable, their voices echoed and their words jumbled and multiplied as they bounced off the walls and ceiling.

His mind started spinning back through the years. Suddenly he recognised the children. How could it be? It was impossible. They were the kids he went to school with. The kids who thirty or more years ago had lived in fear of him. And now the tables had turned.

Part 3

An elderly lady was walking down the street with her dog. As she approached the run-down cottage, the door flew open and out ran a small boy in a cloak carrying an axe followed by ten other children in Halloween costumes and smiling painted faces.They skipped up to her, giggling. ‘Trick or treat?’ they laughed. ‘I thought I come across some witches and ghosts tonight’ said the lady, and she produced from her pocket a bag of sweets and lollipops and handed them out. ‘Thank you’ shouted the children, then they ran off into the darkness.

She went to walk away, but her dog refused to move. Instead it stood rigid, growling as it looked at the open door. It started to tug the lady toward the house. She was unable to hold him back. It was then she noticed that a vivid blinding light was coming from a room at the far end of the hallway. The dog pulled her inside and she shielded her eyes from the dazzling light as she was pulled closer and closer to the room. Her dog continued with its deeply menacing growl, but now she could also hear the distant unworldly sound of children’s voices chanting ‘Billy Bully Brown, Billy Bully Brown’.

As she peered into the room the searing light hurt her head, and through half closed eyes she could just make out the shape of a small boy, sitting cross legged on the floor slowly rocking to and fro. Gradually the light began to fade and the sound of the children became quieter and quieter then disappeared. The child was unaware that she or the dog was there. He just stared straight ahead as he rocked and swayed. She spoke to him, asked his name, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even blink. She tried gently shaking him but he was totally oblivious to her presence. He was gripping something tightly in his hand, a crumpled school group photograph. One face had been cut out and across it was scrawled the name Billy Brown and an arrow pointing to the hole.

She rushed out into the street hoping to find someone to help her, someone with a mobile phone who could call an ambulance. But she found no one. Then from inside the cottage she heard her dog whimpering. She ran back into the room to find the child gone, and to her horror her dog was lying motionless on the floor alongside a bloodstained baseball bat and the screwed up photograph.

A year has passed, and the house has remained locked and boarded ever since. No one knows what happened in the cottage on Halloween night last year. And you can be certain that nobody will go anywhere near that house tonight.

The End....or is it?

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Such a shame!

This weeks prompt at Sunday Scribblings is Shame

Making a cake for her mother’s birthday should have been a doddle. A bag of flour, a box of eggs, some sugar and a little spoon of baking powder. Then a big tub of cream and some raspberry jam to stick in the middle.

It would have been a good idea to leave the butter out of the fridge for an hour or so, because the first task was to blend it together with the sugar. It was like a brick and try as she may she couldn’t make a dent in it. And when she made a sudden strenuous stab at it, it leapt out the bowl and onto the floor! Undaunted she pushed her curious cat to one side, gave it a quick rinse then popped it into the microwave for a few seconds. When it came out it was a bit runny but she no longer had any difficulty in getting it together with the sweet stuff! Time for the eggs. She broke three into a little bowl and whipped them with a fork. A few bits of shell shouldn't hurt. Into the mix they went.

Next the flour. She didn’t have any scales so she decided the best thing would be to keep adding it until the mixture was a bit ploppy. She tipped the bag and nothing came out. She gave it a shake and suddenly a great dollop of flour shot into the bowl and then exploded sending a cloud up into the air completely covering her startled face! After removing the excess from the bowl she got on with blending the ingredients together. The result was a little on the lumpy side but she felt sure it would sort its self out once it was in the oven.

Time to divide it between two sponge tins. Well that was the idea but for some reason or other she had far too much for two tins so she decided to use four. She should have been a bit more careful when she tipped it in because several times it splashed and quite a lot of it ended up on her nose and forehead!

Into the oven. The recipe said the oven should have been preheated, but she felt sure it wouldn't matter. She pulled up a stool so she could watch her sponges rise. She waited quite a long time but although they started to brown nicely they stayed flat as pancakes. Then out of the corner of her eye she spotted the baking powder still sitting in the spoon on the counter. Thank goodness she had four sponges to pile on top of each other!

Out of the oven they came and she set about prising them from the tins. After a little reconstruction she had four circles of cake ready to assemble into a classic Victoria sponge. She spread jam on three of them (and a little on her face) then topped it with lovely thick cream. She should have let the sponges cool down more because the cream began to go a little thin but she managed to keep most of it place. Next job was to pile them on top of each other and dust with icing sugar. She’s seen this done before. Sugar in a sieve, shake and tap, shake and tap. It went everywhere, including in her hair! But despite everything the finished product looked pretty impressive.

Then the doorbell rang. She’d lost track of time and she had no chance to clean up and change her clothes. She opened the door and there were her parents. She stood there looking for all the world like a circus clown. Her mother’s mouth dropped open and her father burst out laughing! He plucked a blob of jam from her face and pecked her on her cheek.

Half an hour later she was all cleaned up and pouring cups of tea. The time had come to produce the cake she’d spent the last few hours toiling over. She stuck a candle in the top, lit it, and then carried it out of the kitchen. They all started to sing happy birthday. Then suddenly she tripped on a rug and watched as the Victoria sponge flew in slow motion across the room and straight into her mother’s lap. There was an explosion of cake, jam and cream. Mother looked shocked, father failed to suppress a fit of the giggles and their daughter stood there not knowing whether to laugh or cry!

It really was such a shame!

Dr Proctor

We were talking in the pub today about doctors. There was a time when the doctor was one of the most important people in the town along with the priest and the local policeman. My friends were telling me about the doctor in their town long before I came on the scene. Dr. Proctor he was called. He knew everybody in fact he’d delivered quite a few of them - midwifes were few and far between back then.

He was well known for walking up to people in the street and publicly updating them on their ailments at the top of his voice. One friend recalls bumping into him in a crowded butchers shop where he loudly announced that my friend had not in fact contracted social disease, it was nothing more than a rash that could have been prevented if he’d paid more attention to his personal hygiene!

He didn’t have time for the Accident and Emergency services. If you had a gash he’d sew it up himself and if someone wandered in having fallen over as a result of over-imbibing he’d kick them out and tell them to come back when they were sober! He didn’t let his nurse do injections. He enjoyed them more than anything else. He would tell you to turn away because he was about to stab you, and before you knew it, the deed was done!

If someone went into the surgery with a cough he’d tell them they were smoking too much, and then light up a cigarette himself! Whenever he examined someone he invariably did so with a cigarette in his hand! He loved a drink too. He was one of the most popular characters at the local pub.

But he obviously had a darker side, a side no one was aware of. One August night he was found slumped in the churchyard. He’d taken an overdose and if it weren’t for a girl walking her dog between the tombstones he would have died there. But the ambulance arrived just in time and he was taken to the place he loathed most, the local hospital. He was pumped out and brought back to life, then put into a bed on a ward on the top floor. It was a hot night and he persuaded the nurse to open a window. When no one was looking he jumped out.

I’m told his funeral was one of the biggest ever held in the town. I wish I’d known him.

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Applefest 2009

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From the Adams Pearmain and Alkmene, to the Winter Wonder and Zabergau. Today I’ve tasted more apples than I ever knew existed!

The South East corner of England is famous for its fruit, and the apple is the king of the crop. And each October at a farm not far from me, we celebrate our favorite fruit at an Apple Festival.

In an enormous barn circular tables were laid out with boxes of apples and everyone was invited to try each and every variety on display. In the centre of each table were bottles of locally made cider and pressed apple juice. Around the walls local cheese makers and bakers and butchers sold their produce.

click on pictures to enlarge


But the apples are only one small part of the event for Applefest is also a music festival. Two stages played host to 10 bands which performed jazz soul and country music to audiences sitting on hay bales.



And at two bars we queued for pints of cider, perry and locally brewed ale. One particularly strong cider went by the rather scary name of SuiCidal!

There was country dancing and puppet shows. A never-ending queue shuffled towards a hog roast and the farm animals looked on clearly annoyed that the peace of a sunny Autumn afternoon had be shattered been hundreds of kids poking and prodding them!

But the highlight of the day for me was the chicken racing! I risked several pence on chicken number five, Sussex Scrambler but it came in last! I didn’t have much luck in the sheep race either!

I’ll leave you with the final act of the day playing me out!

A load of old junk!

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This weeks prompt at Sunday Scribblings is Junk

I’m thinking of getting rid of a load of things that I no longer need. Old sets of crockery, empty picture frames, dust covered LPs and faded books. I’ll probably take them to a car boot sale. I doubt I’ll make much money but I need the space and if I can raise enough for a couple of bottles of decent wine it’ll be well worth the effort.

Did I tell you about the time I helped my friend Rosey with a car boot sale? When she moved out of her parent’s house they insisted she took all her bits and pieces with her. Unfortunately she didn’t have much storage space at her new apartment so I offered to help her to get rid of the things she didn’t want.

We piled loads of stuff into my car – her Smart was far too small to carry everything, and at the ungodly hour of 5.45 am we set off to a muddy field in the middle of nowhere and joined a queue of fellow traders jostling for the most prominent position. We found a space between a large fellow with a shaved head and a liking for tattoos on our left, and a timid little lady and gentleman on the right who were sporting matching green and blue anoraks and wellie boots.
Tattoo man set up his sturdy table and began to load it with beer glasses and pub ashtrays. He had a couple of pub signs and stacks of beer mats. I couldn’t help but wonder how he came upon all this stuff! The little couple laid a white cloth on their table and began to create little piles of knitted jumpers, scarves and lace doilies.

Rosey had borrowed a very wobbly wallpaper pasting table from her dad. We opened it out then began to get her boxes of bits and pieces from the boot of my car. Oh dear! How on earth she was expecting to sell that load of junk I had no idea!

She had a chipped teapot and selection of mismatched cups and saucers. There was a collection of Barbie dolls, some missing arms and others without heads! There was a pile of kid’s books some without covers, and a stack of cassette tapes. Then out came a ghetto blaster followed by several pairs of shoes and boots in pretty poor condition. It took both of us to lift the doll’s house onto to the table, and several minutes to try and reattach the doors and the chimney pot. How she thought she’d sell a rather dirty and rotten rabbit hutch I don’t know but up on the table it went.

By now the table was beginning to bow in the middle, and on one side the legs were sinking into the mud causing several of the items to slide off the end! Undaunted Rosey continued to stack her stock higher and higher. On went a clock with one hand, and wok with no handle. There was one of those jewellery boxes with a pirouetting plastic ballet dancer and a dented riding helmet. By now the table resembled a letter M but undaunted Rosey carried on dumping more and more things on the pile. When the last item had been balanced on top she decided to leave me in charge and set off around the field to see what her competitors were up to.

Surprisingly I did manage to find a few buyers for some of the stuff - only a few pieces but better than nothing. And then the inevitable happened. There was a creek and a crack and with that the table collapsed onto the ground under a heap of Rosey’s unsold treasures!

I tried my best to recreate her display on the grass, but down there it simply didn’t have the impact that it had when it was a tottering tower on the table. I was dreading her reaction when she returned, but needn’t have because she burst into laughter! I started laughing too, but I soon stopped when I noticed that she was carrying a whole pile of junk which she’d bought from some of the other booters. And that wasn’t all. A man appeared pushing a wheelbarrow full of stuff which Rosey had bought for her allotment. There were worn out spades and bent buckets, gappy rakes and odd rubber gloves.

How we managed to get everything back into my car at the end of the day I’ll never know. We took home twice as much junk as we arrived with and most of it ended up in my garage, in fact the majority of it still sits there a year later!

I was going through it the other day in the hope that I could add a few of her bits to mine when I do my garage sale, but apart from the doll’s house and some of the books I fear the rest is as unsalable as it was the first time it went on offer!

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Our Carry On Tuesday prompt for the 20th is ready and waiting for you HERE! I hope you join in with us this week.
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