open a bilingual bookshop café for poets and philosophers to meet

no messing. i am finding out how to keep books (harhar) pay bills and deal with mr taxman. In preparation for my bilingual bookshop café. My lovely dreamy grammatically incorrect goalette (i only just realized that after many hours of gazing at this goal).

Sometimes i think writing things on 43things is the kiss of death cos my goals hang around undone for ages. But, i got my passport this way, the socks got paired and i moved house. And I thought I could chop a pineapple but evidence shows i need to revisit that one.

Ain’t no mountain hiiiiigh enooough…

he’s leasing it to someone already. Another plumber.

If I don’t want this one plumbing my house for an entire week, it maybe wouldn’t be a good place for a bookshop anyway in case his vibes were hanging around in there.

Although now I can drive I can go and select my location. There’s motivation. Where are the bilingual poets and philosophers? By the sea? By the forest? In an industrial park? In my dreams?

the plumber has a corner shop. My mum says he looks like a respectable plumber, and he certainly doesn’t look like a tit-feeling creep but you never know with my luck. Anyway, he’s retiring in December. I thought I would ask my boss if I can have his shop as an office and then turn it into a bookshop (not simultaneously, although there could be a bit of grey area).

It’s on a main crossroads, although this isn’t exactly ‘main’ cos Paris-place set those standards pretty high, it would do. I could so see myself walking down three doors and having a bookshop in the sun.

People I’ve met so far have all been so nice and unrude. I would like them to come to my bookshop, even if they are not poets or philosophers. So far, I like living here, and I think it would strongly benefit from me having a bilingual bookshop café.

So there’s a plan.

gently mad. Have UK paperbacks got bigger, and why is that?

the poets and philosophers will sing too.

100 cheers. I was wondering just now if one day I’d see this come up on someone’s list of “other people’s impossible goals” (i read those avidly!) and then I saw the 100 number.

Wow.

That means one hundred people that I don’t know clicked on it cos they thought – well they thought whatever that thing is that goes through your head when you hit the cheer button.

Oh I so want to do this. I will do this. And it’s lovely to be cheered on to do this. For so little actual effort so far. When it’s going badly I shall just remember it was like nine months or something for a hundred people across the world took the time to click on the idea.

So if I don’t sell 100 books in nine months in a backwater i’ll at least have sense of scale. And meet some interesting people in the process.

Go Me.

i have forsaken you!

How dare I get sucked up into work and everything else and forget that you exist except for as a ‘can’t ever hope to do that’ goal?

LaWeeez Thinks About Her Retirement.
aka The Sooner The Better.

a shit ole day at work there is nothing quite like coming home and thinking about one’s bookshop.

So, everyone that’s had a bad day at work, I suggest you think about your number one goal. See! Instant mood improvement.

Magic.

I know bugger all about books. I know bugger all about shopkeeping. But as a human being, I can learn stuff if I want to.

That’s possibly one of the nicest traits of human beings. We can learn.

As opposed to cats.

It really is the ‘shop’ in the word ‘bookshop’ that is going to be difficult. I feel like I can move mountains – mountains of books especially I’ve had lots of practise at that as we moved a lot. But I’m slightly allergic to handling money matters.

The other day I was involved in a work-related VAT discussion. A “bilingual” one – as if a monolingual one wasn’t going to be painful enough. There were words like VAT, credit, invoice…I mean just nasty scary complicated stuff. If I thought getting a passport was hard, I hadn’t lived until I looked at the VAT regulations website. Just trying to do it properly can get you in to legal shit and it doesn’t tell you how to undo it to be legal. Scary.

So, I am going to study the administrative side of bookshoppery. I went out and bought a book called ‘how to start a business’. And I have decided I cannot possibly have a bookshop without someone who can help take care of this side of things. So I also have to find a partner in unintentional crime against the inland revenue.

Moving forward! Baby steps…