Absence

I haven't updated this for a long time. Life got in the way. I'd finished a relationship, about.. oh, about 5 weeks before my previous post. Started what was to become a new one the day after that post. It's going well, thank you.

We've opened a small tearoom in the village of Headley, Surrey, adjacent to the only store in the village. I don't hold many hopes although the couple that run the store assured us it has every chance of being a success (they used to run the tearoom, until it proved too much for them to run both). Marian's background is in catering - she used to have a restaurant in Spain, a hotel in Holland, trained as a chef at the Metropole hotel in London - so from that aspect, we're fine. She'll be baking and cooking, I'll be serving. (Hmmmm... me and dealing with the public... we'll see.) And the tearoom itself is nice - the place was a shithole when we took it over; filthy, with colonies of spiders in the tearoom itself and rusty equipment in the kitchen. We cleaned and scrubbed, and a friend painted and decorated; Marian brought cute little net curtains for the windows and made some nice gingham tablecloths. I planted flowers by the wall and by the outside tables area. It looks lovely.

What I'm worried about, is how do we get trade. That village is... small. 600 people. People go through it from one place to another - it's on a road that can serve as a shortcut from the A24 to the A25, or from Epsom to Dorking or Reigate. That's the main road. No sidewalks, either, so people don't walk past. They drive past. And by the time they see the tearoom sign (hung just under the shop sign when we're open) and it registers ("hey, there's a tearoom here! let's stop and have a cuppa and cake") they're a hundred yards past it. I know. I did that as well.

Still we (that is, Marian) invested next to nothing and we'll only open at the weekends (I'm not packing in my business, poor as it is - I love what I do).