Charity Shop

I may have been part owner of a general store on the remote Ardnamuchan peninsula for nine years, and I enjoyed the challenge of running it as a business upon which our income depended, but it didn't help me to like shops. I have always avoided shopping and, when I do have to venture inside a shop, like to complete my purchase and be out again as quickly as possible.

So it might be a surprise that I have now joined Mrs MW in giving a few hours of my time twice a week to working in a small charity shop in the village's Main Street. It's good to feel that one is contributing to a worthy cause - particularly one upon which one may, at some future date, to some extent have to depend - and it's good once again to have the discipline of working with other people. However, the greatest challenge is in understanding how this trade works.

Pricing goods is one aspect of this. None of us working there is an expert on fashion or antiques or hobbies such as stamp collecting but we are constantly required to put a price on items about which we are often woefully ignorant. The internet helps: for example, today we put out an artificial Christmas tree which was relatively easy to price because its brand-new equivalent was found using Google. However, we sometimes put a price on an item which is almost immediately snapped up, perhaps by one of those people who buy items from ignorant charity shops like ours to sell at a profit on Ebay; and then one feels a bit sick.

The down-side of these few hours in the shop is how exhausted I feel at the end of them, particularly when I recall that, when we had our own shop, a day's work was at least twice as long and we were doing six of those days on the trot. However, while I wish it wasn't quite so tiring, it is rewarding.