Andy Waring has an allotment in Dorset on which, being southeast facing and with too much space for vegetables, he grows vines. He grows three grape varieties, Regent, Solaris and Orion and produces around 133 bottles a year. But despite rave reviews and rosettes at the Dorset County Show, he refuses to countenance the idea of selling it or indeed increasing his vineyard to help grow a wine trading empire. Because, he says, he doesn’t want to grapple with the inevitable red tape.
Instead, he and his wife drink his wine throughout the year and he can avoid joining the world of retail. Because, as Mr Waring suggests, it’s a business of excessive hassle and misery and this, in the week that Tupperware files for bankruptcy in the US. If you can’t buy a Tupperware container to store your leftovers or transport your quiche to the village fête, then perhaps the world is in an even worse state than we thought.
So the sensible thing is to act like we did when we were kids: play at shopkeeping. Some do it in the form of a bar; creating a pretend pub in their backyard and inviting friends over. Everyone gets to pour drinks and there’s no grubby exchange of money. (Except, actually, in my shed, I built a pretend bar and then got a licence so I could charge my friends for drinks which, I discovered, is actually even more fun.)
But nowhere is pretend shopkeeping more rampant than in the so-called antiques trade. You know the places and you probably know the folk who run them. And because it’s quite obvious they don’t sell anything, they’re either drug dealers or simply enjoying the pretence.
And what could be more pleasant in one’s dotage than to assemble a few antiques and then to sit among them listening to Radio 4, eating a sandwich, sipping on a little glass of wine and reading the paper.
A friend of mine’s father has one such “shop” in Ramsey on the Isle of Man. It’s a clock store called Time and Tide, a collection of all his clocks, and I officiated at its opening last summer.
Twelve months on he has yet to sell one clock and his daughter describes his role as chief sales prevention officer. He sits in the shop, when it pleases him, and reads the paper. Every now and then, the bell sounds above the door and someone enters. The proprietor eyes them with a smile, secretly hoping like hell that they won’t do something so inconvenient as to buy anything. Any hint of a sale, he doubles the price and gets back to his newspaper. No hassle, no taxman and no damn red tape.
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