Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

Iffy MPs & The Phoenix
Monday, May 30, 2011

You’ll have to forgive me for going off at a bit of a tangent now. We’ve been watching all the political campaigning going on in town over the last few weeks. Two Fridays ago it took about 8 to 10 men all day to put up a stage complete with video screen, lighting & sound system in the church square. In the evening the mayoress took to the stage for a little over a quarter of an hour, before joining the gathered flag waving crowds. We sat at a little bar in the square watching all the proceedings, and it just happened to remind me of the time we had the unfortunate opportunity to meet with our own local MP in the UK. The government had been banging on about a new initiative between themselves & the banks as they were trying to encourage banks to lend more money to small businesses. The deal was something along the lines of the government guaranteeing a percentage of the loan. It was bandied about in the media but when we contacted our bank they really didn’t seem to know anything about the details or the small print. So we decided to contact our local MP to book an appointment. We had a meeting with him in a small office in our local library where he held his morning surgery. What a smarmy ******* sitting behind the desk in his maroon House of Commons tie. Made my skin crawl when I had to shake hands. Yuk, yuk, yuk!! Anyway we asked him about the government initiative but he was more interested in how much we already owed to the banks and our suppliers. He totted up the rough figures that we gave him on a pad. We were horrified by what he then suggested. His advice was that as the company was limited we could close the business down, write off all our currents debts, change the company name (it didn’t have to be a big change for example go from Joe Bloggs Ltd to J. Bloggs Ltd) and start again. He said that he’d recently met with another business in our area and given them the exact same advice. We weren’t surprised then when a rival garden centre closed for business only to open a few weeks later with an one extra letter in their name. One of their ex-employees came to ask us for a job and showed us the proof that our rivals had in fact closed their doors owing nearly £500,000. We also spoke to one rep that had lost all his commission on sales made to the original company but still couldn’t get the stock back because it now belonged to the new company. It’s known as the “phoenix” effect, where one company rises from the ashes of the other. All perfectly legal - of course.

When the MP’s expenses row hit the headlines, we read that our local MP had one of the highest expenses claims in either Kent or in fact the whole country. Didn’t surprise us in the least. Apparently he just had to have a second home in London because he couldn’t possibly commute. Poor man.

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The View We Cant Afford To Lose - Part 9 Of Our Story
Monday, May 30, 2011

We had seen pictures of inside the apartment, which looked lovely. When we finally pulled into the only available parking space in the street we were just so relieved to have made it at last. We were sooooo tired, having been awake for nearly 48 hours solid, with aching backs and legs after sitting in the van but this was also our first meeting with the couple from the Internet. We were totally punch-drunk and not at our most chatty, so we probably didn’t make a very good first impression. They showed us around the apartment, explaining where everything was but it was all we could do to keep our eyes open. We took the bare basics out of the van and then collapsed into bed for some much-needed sleep.

We didn’t wake up until late Thursday afternoon!

We had looked on Google earth at the layout of the town and it did look very crowded. I suppose being the dreamers we are, we imagined life in Spain being in a villa with a private pool, but who were we kidding on our budget. Or should I say - lack of budget!! But to be honest, being in the centre of town has turned out to be a massive advantage. We walk absolutely everywhere, because parking here is a total nightmare. Our van hasn’t moved since we arrived. Apparently, the parking situation only gets worse when the tourists start arriving. (Sounds kinda weird saying that because I still feel a bit like a tourist myself). Anyway that’s why so many people ride scooters, because you can park them practically anywhere & most locals do exactly that! But the walking is fun! Not only is it keeping us fit but almost every street has a new little treasure to discover. We have found so many little shops, restaurants, bar & cafes along our travels. But the most amazing thing I will remember from when we first arrived – something that I will never ever forget - was walking down to the beach and seeing the Beautiful, Blue, Gleaming Med. It was like looking at a postcard. This is probably going to sound really strange, seeing as how Charlie and I decided to move here, but neither of us had ever visited Spain before. So standing there, gazing out at the beach was a totally jaw dropping moment for us both. We knew then that whatever happened, we had to try & make things work for us out here, so we would never ever lose sight of that view.

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Square Peg Round Hole - Part 8 of Our Story
Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Packing is a nightmare! Talk about square peg round hole! We had to fit everything we now still owned into the back of a van, along with the dog and ourselves. We purchased vacuum bags to squish all our clothes and bedding into. They are a marvel and I would highly recommend them! Box after box, bag after bag, we loaded the van until you couldn’t have fitted another thing inside apart from a postage stamp. We said all our goodbyes and had farewell meals with friends. Talk about tug at your heartstrings. Anyway, the original plan had been to get the ferry to Santander and then drive the rest of the way down to Feungirola, but although there was room for us & the van on the ferry, they didn’t have any kennel space for the dog. So we had to resort to Plan B & drive all the way down through France and Spain. We purchased our Euros and made sure we had enough change for all the tolls along the way. Sitting on the ferry at Dover, waiting to head across to France, we could hardly believe it. This was it! We were on our way! However, the adrenaline and enthusiasm started to wan on the long drive through the hours of the night. At about 7 o’clock the next morning, nearly at the Pyranees we found a large parking lot with toilets and washrooms where we attempted to get some much needed sleep after being awake for over 24 hours. It really wasn’t comfortable with the three of us squashed together but we managed to doze intermittently for about an hour or so.

It was only when we got out to stretch our legs and use the facilities that we realised we had a puncture.

It was another hindsight moment for us as we had considered getting new tyres for the long journey but thought “no” we’d rather save the money. Oops! We couldn’t believe our luck or rather our lack of it. It took over two hours, lots of cursing, swearing and sweating to change that tyre. After recovering from that disaster we carried on our journey with the drive taking us through the mountains, which were breathtaking. We finally crossed over the Spanish border not long after lunchtime and found somewhere to stop & eat and practice our language skills. Not very good unfortunately. The language skills – not the food I hasten to add. We had several more stops along the journey to buy fuel, massage our numb bums & let the dog out to stretch his legs, which added a lot to the journeys time scale. The last part of the journey driving in the dark through the mountains was hair raising to say the least - but we finally pulled up in Fuengirola sometime after midnight.

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Do We Stay or Do We Go? - Part 7 of Our Story
Tuesday, May 24, 2011

So just how did we turn the dream into a reality? It makes me giggle when I read some of the comments on the Eye on Spain site about people who want to come over here but they’re worried because they’ve only got £5,000 or £10,000. Wow, if only?! We would be surviving on a wing and a prayer. We sold everything we could, including our car. We gave away anything else that wasn’t of any monetary value. We packed boxes up of things we wanted to keep but wouldn’t be able to take with us and stored them with friends & family. We read every bit of information we could about Spain. We borrowed CD’s from the library to try and learn Spanish. I have to say that we are still struggling with the language but we do try and we are getting pretty adept at sign language. We started the long & expensive process of getting our dog his very own doggy passport. Our poor mutt hates the vets, so he wasn’t very impressed. We even gave him a really short hair cut because friends had said how hot it gets for dogs. He lost his beautiful long coat and instead of a beautiful Border Collie he now looks like a Pitbull. We squirreled away as much money as we could and started looking at travel costs to get out to Spain. In the meantime, we had gotten chatting, via Eye on Spain, to a British couple who were living out here. We sent emails to start with and then discovered the wonders of Skype. We would chat to them for hours, again gleaning every snippet of information we could about the lifestyle. They were in the process of moving apartments, going from a two-bedroom place to a three-bedroom. People’s generosity can be amazing some time. Restores your faith in humanity. The couple, who we hardly knew, apart from Skying, offered to put us up while they were going through their moving process. We were blown away by their offer. We then had to make a proper decision. Do we stay or do we go? We sat and wrote out a list of pro’s and cons - reasons to stay in the UK or reasons to head off on an adventure to Spain. Guess what? Spain won hands down!!

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The Dreaded Knock at the Door - Part 6 of Our Story
Monday, May 23, 2011

I’ve been wondering whether to give out all the gory, gritty details of our experiences in the UK or whether to sugar coat everything? But I thought that if anybody is reading this in the UK and is going through the same misery that we went through I might just be able to give a few nuggets of advice. We had no income and lots of expenditure! We did all the sensible phone calls to the banks and credit card companies that we owed money to and tried to negotiate lower payments. Most of them were really helpful with the one exception being Santander. They wouldn’t budge over payments .So if anyone out there is dreading the postman’s visits and those lovely “Your Payment is Overdue” letters as we did for months, then my first bit of advice would be to contact the Consumer Credit Counselling Service or C.C.C.S. They are on the Internet and they are a totally FREE advice service. Everyone on the other end of the phone is completely understanding and non-judgmental. They helped me out a lot, providing me with template letters & Income & Expenditure details that could be forwarded to any creditors. I was advised to offer my creditors a very small monthly amount and even if they complained that it wasn’t enough I was told to ignore their pleas for more money and just keep on paying regardless. Priority bills have to be mortgage/rent, council tax and then utilities. A credit card company cannot get you evicted from your home, whereas a mortgage company, landlord or the council can.

My second snippet of advice is to try and avoid debt management companies, if you can. Obviously I don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush but we knew someone who used to work for a debt management company. They would set up a payment scheme between you and your creditors but pocket a large chunk of your money instead of paying your debt. So do your research and be wary.

Now the really nasty one – debt collectors or bailiffs. We had one debt with a certain company, that despite being told we had closed the company and that the company had no assets kept pursuing us. For your information if a bailiff knocks on your door YOU DO NOT have to let him in. They cannot force their way in. And beware if they ask to use your toilet or use your phone to make a call, its one of their sneak tactics to get inside. Even if they arrive with police assistance, the police are there purely to keep the peace and cannot force you to let the bailiff in. DO KEEP YOUR DOORS & WINDOWS LOCKED if you leave the house though because bailiffs DO have the right to enter your house through any open door or window, even if they have to climb into your back garden to do it. However, they CANNOT list anything they see though windows. Again, if you find yourselves in the unfortunate position of having people knocking on your door, check out the Internet for details and know what your rights are!

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Discovering Eye On Spain - Part 5 of our Story
Monday, May 23, 2011

When we first started looking at properties to rent in Spain it was really only a fantasy. New details would come through on the Internet and we would gaze longingly at them but we thought, “never gonna happen”. So we carried on doing the sensible thing, looking for UK rental property. But it was SO disappointing! No garden, no dog’s allowed and tiny rooms, where any furniture bigger than an armchair, would fill the whole space. We were running out of options and fast. Then, purely by chance, Charlie bumped into an old acquaintance of ours that was living in Spain but had returned for a couple of weeks to visit her friends and family. We arranged to meet up for a drink and a chat. We were fascinated about her life in Spain. She didn’t have one bad thing to say about her experience out there. She had been living in Spain for just over two years so we bombarded her with questions about the weather, the culture, the language, anything & everything we could think of. We were so curious about it all. It sounded idyllic. Maybe, just maybe, we could turn the fantasy into reality, so we started looking at ex-pat sites and that was when we discovered Eye on Spain & got chatting to a couple who could potentially change our lives?!

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Spain - Only A Pipe Dream?! Part 4 of Our Story
Friday, May 20, 2011

They say that everything happens for a reason. Even if at the time you have no clue what that reason might be! Only later, when reflecting on where we are now – beautiful sunny Spain - do we realise that if there hadn’t been a recession, if our business hadn’t closed, if we hadn’t tried every other option in the UK, we wouldn’t be here now. But I am jumping the gun a little bit. I wanted to explain our story and how we came to be out here.

When we finally closed the gates on the garden centre we actually felt a great sense of relief! After all, nobody could accuse us of not trying. We had worked seven days a week, giving up on precious family time and any hope of a social life. We had ploughed every penny we had into the venture, along with loans from the banks – Big Mistake!!! It was a very strange feeling, going from working flat out, to sitting and watching Jeremy Kyle in the mornings. We tried to carry on with the landscaping side of the business, our mainstay before opening the garden centre, but nobody was prepared to spend out on improving their homes and the undercutting by other businesses made it impossible. We sold our beautiful motorbike just to make enough to pay the rent and eat. We got up at stupid o’clock on Saturdays and Sundays to sell bits and pieces at the local boot fairs. We were surviving. Just! It seemed that life in the UK was going nowhere. For us anyway. We started checking out the Internet for cheaper rental property. What a joke! If we wanted a shoebox for a little less than we were currently paying, then brilliant. The rental market was taking off as more and more people were turned down for mortgages and landlords had carte blanche on prices. And despite England supposedly being the home of dog lovers – no one would entertain renting a property to anyone with a dog. Our dog is a part of our family and there was no way we would consider selling him. Then one evening, for a laugh, we thought we’d check out the international section of a certain property site. What an eye opener! For the same price as a UK “shoebox”, we could get a two or three bedroom apartment in Spain AND they didn’t seem to object to animals. But surely that was only a pipe dream?!

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The Banks Giveth &The Banks Taketh Back. Part 3 of Our Story
Monday, May 16, 2011

Retail, in any field is pretty much a guessing game, trying to figure out what potential customers might want to buy from you. We had already learnt throughout the summer that whatever stock you bought in, it was never quite right for some customers. If you had pink geraniums they wanted white. If you had white, they wanted red. You get the picture!! But our real dilemma was - just how many real Christmas trees do you buy in for re-sale when there’s a recession?? After two seriously quiet trading months during October & November we had to take the plunge and make the decision just how many Christmas trees to buy in. People had already started tightening their belts. And who could blame them with all the daily doom and gloom news reports about the banks, job losses, house repossessions etc. so it was a big gamble for us. We considered that it would go either one of two ways. Either nobody would bother as Christmas is a really expensive time of year OR they would say “what the hell, lets go for it, have a brilliant time this year and worry about the cost next year”. We decided on the second option and luckily we were spot on! We ordered and sold hundreds of real trees and wreaths, selling out two days before Christmas, enabling us to shut shop early and do our own crimbo shopping. However, January and February, when its sub zero outside, tend to be another couple of empty till months. But you still have bills to pay! So we turned to our friendly bank for some much needed financial assistance. They were only too happy to oblige. After all, we had re-styled the whole garden centre, increasing both its reputation and its sales, tripling the turnover! We had big plans for expansion the following year, so the bank agreed quite happily to extend our loan and our overdraft. We ordered more stock for the new season and made quite a killing on Mothers Day. Nothing says, “I Love My Mum” better than flowers or plants. We managed to stay afloat throughout the summer, despite watching many other businesses, both big & small, fall by the wayside. Then the dreaded winter was upon us again. However, this time things were totally different! Nobody, but nobody was spending out on luxury items and we ended up returning unsold Christmas trees to the supplier at a fraction of the cost to us. By now the banks were getting overly cautious after many of them had been bailed out by the British taxpayer. They no longer wanted to lend any money out to small businesses and any money they had already lent out, they seemed to want back as quickly as possible. In February the banks demanded repayment of our overdraft, so instead of buying in new stock for the start of our third year trading, we had no alternative but to shut up shop. We later found out that if a bank manager is moving from one branch to another they have to clear all debts before the new manager takes over. And our manager wanted to move. So that was it - the dream was over! We had invested all our time, money and effort into this venture. So how on earth were we going to move on?

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Mrs. M. The Legend! Part Two of Our Story
Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The best part of running our garden centre was the customers. Not all of them mind, but some of them became regulars and even if they didn’t want to buy anything, they would come into the shop for a chat and a free cup of tea. I think we served as many teas as the snack wagon outside in the corner of the car park. We nicknamed our shop The Confessional as people would come in and start telling us their life stories. We weren’t nosy and certainly didn’t pry – they just seemed relaxed enough in our company to pour their hearts out. Either that or the shop was used as a “soapbox” where people would come in and air their grievances about what was going on locally or in the news and we would have a good debate. Others came in purely for a laugh and some good-natured banter. Our favourite couple, Mr & Mrs M., were in their early 70’s, but they joked around like teenagers and had other customers and us in stitches most of the time. In our second summer of trading we expanded into the hot tub spa market and put up a massive gazebo in the middle of the garden centre with working models on display. I have to say they were impressive. The spas had hot water, bubbling away invitingly with flashing lights & a waterfall around the outside – irresistible! Mrs. M. absolutely loved them when she first saw them and promised that she’d be back the next week with her bikini. We thought that she was joking, but the next week when she arrived she started cursing and swearing because she’d forgotten her cozzy. She was really angry with herself. But instead of waiting till the following week to test out the spas as we advised, she stood on the gazebo, in the middle of our garden centre and stripped off to her bra & knickers and jumped in! She sat there for nearly an hour, drinking a cup of tea whilst other customers wandered past her laughing & giggling. She didn’t give a fig what anyone else thought. Mind you that was the easy part! The hard part came when she decided to get out. We searched everywhere for a towel and then she stripped off completely, in full sight of everyone to dry herself. Mrs. M. was a legend! Without days like that, I think we would have found it very tough to keep on going as times got harder and harder.

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Hindsight is a Wonderful Thing! Part One of Our Story
Monday, May 9, 2011

They say that hind sight is a wonderful thing. On that Friday night in February, when we had to make the final decision about whether to take over a rather run down garden centre, if someone had warned us that the world was about to nose dive into recession, perhaps we would have said no. But at the time it seemed the perfectly logical thing to do. It was the next big step forward as a company. What could possibly go wrong?!

Maybe we should have had someone over to read our tarot cards for us and predicted what the future held. I mean they can be quite accurate. I had had my cards read for me many years before. At the time I thought Madam Fifi or whatever her name was had told me a load of mumbo jumbo. I had smiled politely, whilst inwardly laughing at her comments, thrown the tape of the reading in a cupboard and forgotten about it. Until her predictions had started coming true!! At the time of the reading I was the mother of three small children, one only two months old. My world consisted of washing, cleaning, cooking and child care. When she said I would do some voluntary work that would lead to a career I thought “Yeh right, like I wanna work for free!!” I was already doing that at home. But when my youngest started full time education I suddenly had a whole day to fill and watching This Morning just wasn’t cutting it. So when the PTA asked for volunteers to help out in their “Wildlife Garden” at the school, I jumped at the chance. After all I loved gardening. I had lovingly redesigned my own back garden, learning about every plant I had bought, its likes and dislikes, soil type, aspect, requirements. Little did I know when I volunteered that the Dell, as it was called, constructed out of an old bomb crater from WW2 was an overgrown, weedy patch, full of fox holes and half chewed trainers that the foxes had stolen. 3 or 4 volunteer mums had the unenviable task of constructing paths, painting the bird hide, building and stocking a wildlife pond and trying to control the 6-7 foot tall stinging nettles that grew everywhere. Couldn’t have them stinging the little darlings on one of their bug hunts – Health & Safety don’t you know. But it was fun!! I was out of the house, chatting to other mums, getting fresh air and free exercise. Even at that stage I hadn’t thought about the tarot reading. Only later when I was asked to mow a friend’s lawn on a fortnightly basis and get paid for it and a small garden maintenance business developed, did I think about the tape.

If Madam Fifi had sat with us on that February evening and predicted the future then maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, writing about the demise of our business. We weren’t the only ones, not by a long shot. I mean we lasted a year past Woolworths closing their doors. That was a shocker!! And MFI and Zavvi and all the other hundreds of businesses that had no option but to shut up shop. But on that evening as we smoked another cigarette and said should we or shouldn’t we, it seemed like the only logical thing to do. The world was our oyster. The only way is up. Things can only get better. As I said, hind sight is a wonderful thing!!

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