So today we got out of town and spent the morning in one of our most favourite villages, Stow-on-the-Wold. It was a particularly beautiful day, sun shining, 18*C, slightest breeze, gorgeous. Couldn’t have asked for better weather. We had some lovely food, walked about and peeked in charity shops–looking (always) for that unique item that should come home with us, and dreamed in antique shops.
It seemed a promising day when first we popped into one of the best antique shops, funnily enough owned by two Americans, where I spied a chest of drawers; from 1800′s made of bleached elm, nearly what I’ve been thinking of for when we have the money(!). It was gorgeous. Two small drawers on top followed by 3 main drawers below. Natural looking, not pretentious and glossy, but charming with it’s various limited carvings and key holes in place of knobs. Going price: £1,285. Bargain? Well, as the owner saw us checking it out (again, dreaming) he came over and we started chatting. He remembered us from our previous visits and said he could sell it for £1,100… yeah, what a deal. We did not buy it. Don’t get me wrong… we wouldn’t have bought it as we’re not even close to being in that market. But, it was nice to feel ‘included’ in that clientele.
On to the next, we popped into a persian rug shop… this is where it becomes bizarre/bazaar. We only went in to look… again, we’re dreaming and getting ideas for the future. The shop owner seemed nice, but soon it was blatantly clear he was a typical persian bazaar salesman trapped in an Irish horse-race-betting facade. He started showing us rug after rug… until Carl found one he really liked and then I found one I really liked. One of the rugs was £7000… yeah, that’s nearly my yearly income! (sad, but true story), who knows what the other one was worth. So, the next thing I knew the guy was asking us to make an offer, he’d do £1500 for both. Okay, not gonna buy any rugs today! After what seemed like hours of thinking, ‘wow, we’d really like to have these rugs’… and also ‘how can we get out of here, we’re really not able to buy anything this pricey’… we were finally able to leave. Our ‘out’ was that Carl and I needed to give it a think and decide what we’d like to do; fully knowing we’d not come back to the shop and we’d not buy a rug, or two.
At lunch, we saw the rug shop owner walk past. Oh dear… just the direction we needed to go to get back to our car. Carl said we should go the opposite way and around to get back to the car park, but I chose to follow hobbit logic: ‘the closer you are to danger the further you are away from harm.’. So, I said we should follow the rug guy’s direction as we’re not likely to run into him if he’s ahead of us. Yeah, my plan didn’t work. As we were leaving the cafe who do we run into? Yes, the rug guy. All we could do was say our peace and be on our way. After saying ‘thank you, but no thank you, we were not prepared to purchase anything today’ he offered both rugs for £1000… as he choked on the words. Again, we said thank you, but we could not buy them today and then we were off.
As we drove home, Carl and I discussed the events of the day; if we had the money we would be the owners of two persian rugs based on the last offer. But, thankfully we have more sense than money… and we’re doing alright.