Its My Bag Man!

I popped in to see my old pal Ed who runs a shop called Bushman, which is a mishmash of smashing stuff from around the world. Woodcraft from Africa, bags and incense from India, Native American crafts etc. I love to stand and talk toot with Ed who cares greatly about the planet and is an excellent and smashing bloke. It was Ed who made me think that it would be possible to earn a living out of selling fair trade and for that I thank him.

Tomorrow we are heading up to Lincoln to spend some time with mum, who is having a small operation on her eyes. We are going to call in at Colnbrook on the way to pick up a shipment of bags which we have had made in Ghana. Check out Trashybags.org to see the story of these great bags.

I am going to try and blog often when the season starts but for now Love and Peace to you all.

Mermy

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Just a quick update to the travels and travails of the merfolk.

Well, the solar panel is fitted and fine, but the batteries were the wrong size for the space, being about 1 inch too high:( The regulator was not needed as the current one is ok for the extra load and we ran out of time before the vent could be fitted. We will probably sort the other few little issues out later in the week.

As for the market in Gosport…..We would have been better off staying at home and giving the stock away. I will just say to Hughmark International that if you want a successful market in a town like Gosport, then charge a descent pitch fee. £43.50 for ten feet is nonsense and it is little wonder that the market is half empty but for veg stalls, mobile phone unlockers and womans fashion. £25 would be a sensible price in the current economic state.

Today we are going to visit the Registry office in Fareham to dot the i’s for our forthcoming nuptials and for Rosie to get a bit of retail therapy in.

Peace and love

Mermy and Rosie Glow

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So here is the news of Mortimer Motorhome.

We eventually left the house in Grantham at 5pm on Monday, and got stuck at the top of the street for 20 minutes or so due to a bit of dickhead parking from not one but two cars. We are on a terraced one way street with a big bend at the top and by the time we cleared the road, there was a queue of no less than 26 cars attempting to get past. Ho hum!

We stopped off at our lockup  to collect a couple of things, and La Rosie realised that we had left the large solar panel we are having fitted tomorrow by Pal Mal, at home in the kitchen. No way we were going to drive back up the street, so we parked half a mile away and walked! Lucky for me I also left our folding sack barrow at home so that was conscripted to carry the solar panel.

We eventually arrived in Stoke on Trent where we spent Tuesday having a top class towbar fitted by Towtal

(Re editing due to wordpress only saving half the blog!)

We left Stoke to head down to Cannock where we picked up our new trailer from Lee at Midland Trailer Centre and then poodled on down to Hampshire to see family and have some stuff done on Morty. We are having A new solar panel, two new batteries, a power vent and a new solar regulator.

We are chilling out till Saturday when we will be doing the local market.

Love and peace

Mermy and La Rosie

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5 more days until our travels start.

The wall is fixed and looks great (Yes I did do it myself Omally!)

The motorhome is fine.

But…..We still have about a week or more of stuff to do;( 

We have decided to go on our travels as planned but we need to come back as my mum is going to have a minor operation on her eyes, and so we will use the time to finish off all the tasks we will have to leave undone.

Did I mention that we have a date for the civil wedding ceremony? No? Well we have set the date as the 14th June in Fareham. We are not inviting anyone other than my mother and children and Rosie’s Aunt. We are however going to have a huge party later in the summer to which you are all invited. More info on that event and location to follow. (It may be two parties, one southern and one northern to save people the expense of travelling.)

That is all for now.

Love and Peace

Mermy

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We are currently decorating our bedroom and given the fact that the plaster is almost as old as the house (100 years) it came as no surprise that prising a bit of loose plaster off the wall…….

B&Q sell quite cheap plasterboard and plaster and I know with a little practice I can get a decent smooth finish…..

Oh, and another thing, how does dust get through two closed doors and all over the kitchen worktops?

Love and peace

Mermy

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So as previously stated in these pages, Rosie and the Merman went on a pilgrimage to our main supplier in Canterbury yesterday.

We started as planned at six and thirty of the clock and made good time to Saffron Waldon where we picked up our new fire extinguisher. Then swiftly on to Bishop’s Stortford to swap two battery led lanterns for the correct dynamo hand crank version, which as an aside are superb and a minutes winding gives ages of lovely free light. Finally on the road to Canterbury and arriving at our lovely supplier before 11am. 

Rosie and I had a plan which we stuck rigidly to for the first 3 minutes and then went into a feeding frenzy of stock buying which ended three hours later with soooo much money changing hands. We did however come away with a totally full van of stock including:

• 11 Didjes
• 250 assorted bags
• lovely mirrors
• 7 dozen lots of worry people
• 10 dozen friendship bracelets
• knitted haki sacks
• mexican jergas (Pronounced herga)
• grandad shirts
• tie dye trousers
• Djembe drums
• wood carvings
• felt hair scrunchies
• Also some AMAZING Tree spirits carved into recycled wood in northern Thailand.

There was tons of other stuff but I won’t bore you further.

I then drove to Londinium to pick up a load of bags from the East End. We went over the river on the Woolwich Ferry, as La Rosie has never done it before, so it was an adventure for her. They were down to a one boat service as Sally Traffic would say and we had to sit and wait for half an hour, which was lovely and peacful and we did some paperwork and drank coffee till the ferry arrived and we wooshed over to East London and made our way to our final supplier who is a lovely lady called Bettina who is South African and gave Rosie a free bag.

Given the fact that it was 5pm when we headed towards the M11, it was not very busy and we made superb time to Corby where Rosie picked up our little Fiat from where we had to leave it (I sprained my ankle and she had to come and pick me up) and we headed home.

355 miles and 14 1/2 hours on the road.

Pizza and Merlot for dinner at 9pm and leave the unloading of the van till tomorrow.

Love and peace

Mermy

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I am labelling today as one, as I have no more work and Rosie has no more work and we both are working harder than proper work to get ready for the off.

Tomorrow we are driving a 350 mile round trip in the van to Saffron Waldon, Bishop’s Stortford, Canterbury and Corby collecting, exchanging and returning stock and picking up the Fiat from Argos distribution which was left there when Mermy sprained the ankle last week.

We will be leaving at 6.30am and should all being well, be home before 8pm.

Today we are decorating the bedroom and fixing the toilet and going shopping and clearing the loft in anticipation of the car boot we are going to do next week.

Anybody got a time machine we can borrow please?

Love and peace

Mermy

Addendum to this list, we are now also going to the East End of London to collect more bags so better get a good nights kip!

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Thanks to Rosie and her skill with Google I now have most of my posts back and after much copy pasting I have manually entered them back into the DB.

I lost the comments so if you could all go through every post and try to remember what you said………….

Peace

Mermy

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Who on earth updates the blogging software and forgets to backup the posts and the database first?

Who then listens to someone else who says “All you have to do is to go into mysql admin and …..”?

All my posts are gone as are all the comments from you lovely folks.

I am going to backup my database weekly from now on.

Love and peace

mermy

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