Selling

and a trip down memory lane

I spend a fair amount of my life selling stuff. This was not the plan, you understand, but the inevitability of self-employment. Either I’m selling my services (training courses) or products (livestock, meat, lambskins, wool, books). There’s more than one irony here.

Irony number one is that I spend not insignificant units of energy in reassuring people on our courses that a smallholding life doesn’t mean you have to produce surplus if getting away from a corporate role or pressure from the grind is the whole rationale for smallholding in the first place. Keep it small, keep it simple is the mantra – no need for selling and all that entails if the very idea of turning your veg patch and three sheep into a venture rather than an adventure is anathema.

Irony number two is that my parents had a joke shop in Soho. Yes, really. It was across the road from The Globe Theatre, renamed as the Gielgud Theatre in 1994. I haven’t walked past it in decades and understand that where the shop stood is all but undetectable after years of development. It was a small narrow shop filled to overflowing with whoopee cushions, stink-bombs, rubber bloody-ended thumbs, dipping birds, scarily fizzoged puppets, rubber over-the-head masks of everything from Miss Piggy to the devil incarnate, fully regaled beefeaters and bearskin-wearing footguards – or busbies as we called them – and every imaginable kind of London souvenir. Pinched between a Chinese restaurant and a take-away pizza place where the cook twirled three foot pizza bases above their head which pretty much filled the width of their equally narrow shop, it hung on, anachronistically, for decades, providing the family with all its needs. Hamleys would send over tourists who having shopped their fill at that toy mecca, would come and giggle at the goods and leave with yet more carrier bags of humorous tat as a foil to their plush Steiff bears bought as investments. The shop was an effective sort of stocking filler.

Anyway, the point of all this is to say that although I knew what was involved, or perhaps because I knew what was involved, I didn’t find shop-keeping and selling particularly engaging, even though my school and student years had me working in various shops to top up my pocket money and later my student grant (those good old days). My first full time job was working as Arts Officer for a local authority, and yet again, there I was, putting on events and having to sell tickets. I didn’t hang around street corners touting, but I had to do everything else; book the events, plan the events, promote the events, be at the events, run around like a blue-arsed fly at the events and smooth whatever important furrowed brows were created by the events. Later still I had to sell myself. Not in an illegal sense, but the less-kind might call it whoring, doing consultancy work for arts organisations. There is huge joy working with artists and those who support them. I don’t regret a minute of it.

As the farm work grew, selling our surplus became critical to making the farm wash its face. This was a different ball-game altogether. Talking about our produce and services is not the same as selling a ticket to a concert that you wouldn’t dream of attending if you didn’t have to, but were promoting because it was the sort of stuff that was popular in the locale. I’m not saying it is an unalloyed joy, because there can always be issues when money is changing hands, but talking about something you truly believe in to people who are genuinely interested too, is a huge win. And I really care about the feedback, so for example when one lovely woman wrote on her feedback form last weekend “I was amazed how much I learned. Andrew and Debbie were wonderful teachers. I loved the weekend and didn’t want it to end. I need you both in my life”, you can imagine how warm and fuzzy that left me, and there was more of the same from most of the other attendees.

So there I am, still selling. Which is a relief, because the proliferation of AI means our websites are more difficult to find these days and there’s bugger all I can do about that, apparently. And because of what we sell, our sales are always an effective benchmark for how people are responding to the vagaries of the economy. Feeling the pinch? You’re definitely not going to risk a job change or a work from home focus and relocation to rural bliss just yet; those smallholding plans are being put on hold for the forseeable. You’ll also be buying a single pack of mince from the butcher or supermarket rather than a 10kilo box of 100% grass fed beef from me. In boom years we keep putting on extra course dates, in bust years we do less. And then there are fashions; interest in certain things comes and goes. For years we quickly ran out of our raw sheep’s fleece, sold as shorn off the sheep and frequently sent in bulk to the U.S. Now, we sell half or three quarters of it at most over the year, and use the rest as tree mulch on the farm. If I was in my twenties this might worry me, but I’m not and it doesn’t. But I still laugh when I think about the contrast between the Miss Piggy masks of youth and the pigs in the paddock in maturity. I know which I prefer.