Good things come to those who.....

Hello fellow bloggers and readers alike. Firstly let me not apologise for lack of blogging action in the past 2 weeks, for as you are about to find out, I have been rather busy.

I left you last time on the eve of my Aunts funeral. The funeral itself was in Shrewsbury, and the 'do' after was at my cousins local pub/restaraunt thing. Now, for those who know me, you'll know that I've been to far too many funerals for my liking, and more than enough to know that funerals do not go well. Now, in our family, funerals in recent memory don't go quite according to plan, for example, during my fathers funeral, the vicar referred to me by my fathers name, which kinda broke the tension slightly! So you get the general idea that mistakes tend to happen when the vicar is reading the sermon in church....which happened again at my Aunts funeral. The vicar (who had come out of retirement especially for this, bless!), for some inexplicable reason, referred to my cousin as Tizzy, when in fact she is Liz. Surely even someone of the faith can read typed writing! But apart from that, it was a very good funeral (not sure if you can say that but I suppose it can't be a fantastic one!), and the do afterwards was excellent, with a good sarnie and nibbles spread laid on very well by the pub/restaraunt.

After this, the majority of us went back to my cousins house for tea and a good ole family chat, during which we mentioned the incident with the ghostly fog we drove through on the way home the week before to my uncle, who, together with my cousin, stopped and said, completely straight-faced 'oh, that will be old Ippikin'..........'Pardon?'

Yes, it is true, there are hundreds of websites to support this theory, or even fact, you make up your mind, here or here, but either way it was very scary!

So, then it was onto the main part of my blog, and I promise you, the blog gets better from here (well, apart from the end!)

My dad collected football programmes all his life, from Internationals and European Cup matches, to non-league and Premiership matches, as did his dad before him, and when he died, he handed them down to my good self to sell on, which I have never had the chance to, mainly because I am slightly lazy, and also because I've been way too busy studying to commit so much time to it. However in August of last year, I decided to take it upon myself to type up some lists of all the football programmes he had, with a view to selling them. This, I assumed, would take me about a month or so, as I assumed there were only a couple of thousand at the most, by which point I could sell them for a few hundred quid and save a bit of space around the house.....3 months later, I realised just what I had taken on....

There were around 8,000 of the blummin things!!

So, we were left with a dilemma. We knew that if I wanted to, I could be very business like and go around Programme Fairs, selling them for the maximum amount that they were worth and making a tidy profit, as we knew pretty much what they were worth. However that would take about 3 or 4 years to achieve and thats just way too much time to worry about the collection, so I sent my lists to various collectors, who weren't interested in the lot, just the odd one or two that were worth the most, and leaving the rest, but we didn't want that, we wanted rid of them asap. So, after scouring auction websites, and getting no response, we finally received some good news that pretty much blew us away.....Christies wanted to auction the lot, and they thought they were worth a bundle!

For anyone who doesn't know who Christies are (**sigh**), they are basically the doyen of the auction world, anyone who is anyone in the world, has bought or sold at a Christies auction.

Anyone who doesn't know what 'doyen' means, really should get out more!

They have a Sporting Memorabilia Auction twice a year and wanted my collection to feature in it, the only problem was, they wanted to have the entire collection in their possession by the end of January. They told us this about 2 weeks ago and since then, we haven't got to bed before 1.30am, working on getting the programmes in some sort of order and stacking them in large Bank Boxes, ready for delivering to Christies in South Kensington high street. Now, as you may be realising, things don't go very much to plan with me, however if you have as much true grit and determination as I do, things like.....oh I don't know.....the print cartridge in your printer running out at the very moment you need to print off 130 pages of Football Programmes......doesn't bother you very much, as you just click into gear and race up the road to tescos to get a new one.....as what happened on Wednesday night.......at 12.30am.....when we really needed an early night......as we were driving down to London to deliver the programmes on the Thursday!

We eventually managed to get to bed at 3am, by which point we were sorely tempted to hop into the van, which, having picked it up from the hire place on wednesday night, I spent 10 mins in the car park trying to work out how to reverse, before giving up and getting the girl in the hire shop to come and help (you press the gear stick down, in case you are ever in that situation!), anyway we were tempted to jump into the van and beat the early morning traffic in London to deliver it first thing, but we decided that we were too knackered and set off at 8.30am to get into London for around midday, after stopping off on the way and making a day of it really.


Ok, Competition Time, and its spot the difference, so your question is, what is the difference between this image....


















...and this image..?















Ok I'll give you a clue, the first image is all the boxes stacked up before we set off in the morning, and the second is when we realised that you shouldn't really stack cheap boxes 4-deep when you are travelling on a motorway for over 2 hours!

We stopped off at Cherwell Valley Service Station, which, like most service stations nowadays, has been developed into something resembling the Bullring, and so, before we went into the Little Chef to relive my childhood, we checked the van, and after opening it up and picking up the programmes that had fell out of the damaged boxes, set to work on repairing the boxes that couldn't stand the weight and just caved in. Luckily, none of the programmes were damaged, so we continued the journey into London, glad we had checked the van and learned a valuable lesson!

So to London-shire, and every time I go to London, I do have to sit back and marvel at just how spectacularly amazing it is. Not only visually but the whole atmosphere resembles some kind of magical realm, where everywhere you go you see something new, different, old or new. Anyway South Kensington high street is a lovely little high street just through Chiswick and Hammersmith high street, and the entrance to Christies 'Tradesmans' entrance was round the back of the main shop, through what was described to us as 'a narrow alleyway'. Nope, it was such a small alleyway that we missed it the first time as there was someone in front of it, IT WAS THAT SMALL!

But, as I have mentioned, I am a determined blighter and I managed to get in and out quite expertly, I have to say! Anyway the upshot of it was we got in, unloaded the boxes, signed them off and the auction is on April 3rd, therefore a Christies link shall now be on my blog, as they are now my new best friends!

Whoopee-doo, the final part of my blog, and its back to painful reality. I've got my exploratory operation on Monday, and thankfully I'm not having a local aneasthetic via a needle 'down there', so thats good. Lets just hope what they find is as good, coz thats my only other concern, apart from being able to walk for the days after! So I shall post, hopefully on Monday to let you know how it all went, and what the news is, coz if I'm gonna go through it, I'm gonna take as many people as I can along for the ride!!