Simon Barford Painting Portraits

It was in the hairdresser’s that I first met Simon Barford.  Toni & Guy, to be precise, on Castle Street opposite M & S.  He’s really good at cutting hair - one of the few people I’ve ever been to whose styling I don't wash out as soon as I get home because it doesn’t feel like me.  But he’s even better at painting portraits.  In fact, painting anything you want.  All you have to do is ask, and provide Simon with a photograph.  Or ask, and he’ll provide the photograph himself - and it will always have something a little bit different about it, something special about the subject matter that catches the eye and can be developed into something interesting.

Simon paints every night in his studio from 9.00pm onwards. At the end of the day, after work and family time, these are the hours that are his own.  One day he'd love to paint full time and make a living out of it.  And he's on his way.  Simon's large and often startling paintings are already selling.  Yet remarkably Simon only started painting three years ago.   

I know all this because the other day Simon brought over a few canvasses to show me.  He said he didn't much care for art when he was at school - but then he didn’t much care for anything.  ‘School failed completely to inspire me,' he said.  'But I was heavily dyslexic.  Nothing inspired me.'

What happened, I wanted to know, to turn Simon into an artist? Three years ago, he said, a friend turned forty and was having a bit of a bash.  He produced a present list and on it was a reproduction of a George Ioannou painting of Michael Caine.  Simon looked at the picture and thought I could do that.  It was his eureka moment.  He bought a canvas and a small set of acrylics and set to.  The result, everybody assured him, was indistinguishable from the Ioannou painting.  Needless to say, as fortieth birthday presents went, it was a massive hit.  Friends who saw it wanted portraits of other subjects. Suddenly Simon was in business. Clint Eastwood? He'd give him a go.  Steve McQueen. Jack Nicholson. Desmond Tutu. Even the minis from 'The Italian Job'. Simon had discovered what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Simon loves painting, but is self-depricating about what he’s doing.  'I'm a copyist, he told me. 'But I reckon I'm good at it.'  He couldn't have been more matter-of-fact. There were no frills to what he said, no fuss, no bigging up.  This is what I do, he seemed to be saying, and I love it, and by the way I'm  proud of it. I know there's a lot to learn but I'm working hard to develop my skills. 

It’s not only portraits that Simon paints. With his father-in-law’s sixtieth birthday approaching, Simon wanted to give him a painting of his favourite corner of the Lake District.  He looked at the work of William Heaton Cooper, found a photo of the appropriate landscape and painted it in Heaton Cooper’s style.  When his father-in-law saw it, so convinced was he that Simon had bought an original that he scolded him for spending so much money.  Simon owned up - but the present was no less appreciated. 

Simon often paints for presents or special occasions. Boats, cars, landscapes, portraits – he’s turned his hand to them all. Whether painting for family or on commission, his criteria for embarking upon a project is very simple.  He has to feel a sense of urgency about taking the commission, and he needs to come up with an unusual angle to work from - a photograph that rings some sort of bell, that tells you something about a person, that has its own particular quirk.

'Each painting takes about fifty hours,' Simon said.  'And most of them are big. I've no idea if I'm doing it right because I've never been taught, but all my paintings start the same way.'  First Simon finds the idea for his painting, then he draws with either oil or acrylic onto canvas -  'making marks' he calls it - then he develops, builds up and fine tunes his painting.  ‘I don’t use expensive equipment,' Simon told me, 'but simply what I have to hand. I’m looking for a narrative. I want my paintings to tell a story. It's important, though, not to overwork them. I think I've developed a sense of when I should stop.'


Simon is full of ideas. At the moment he's captivated by the idea of magic of the sleight-of-hand variety. He’d love to do some paintings that showcase conjurors' hands in the process of performing magic tricks. 'I'd paint all the time if I could,' he told me. 

But if he did that, what would happen to my hair? 

View Simon Barford’s work for sale here:

http://www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk/simon-baford-art/artwork/all

Email simonbarfordart@hotmail.com  

At The Pub With Susan Caroline of Pengwern Books [A Cunning Plot & a Conversation About Publishing]

Yet another long, warm summer evening, and I’m in the Dog & Pheasant on Castlefields talking to Susan Caroline of Pengwern Books. It's had a checkered life since opening in Fish Street in 2004, and so has she.  Keeping an independent bookshop in business in the current book-selling climate, with the publishing industry in disarray, has taken a lot of ducking and diving. Susan's doggedness is astonishing.

Pengwern Books has had a variety of homes, not least of which has been to the immediate right of the altar in St Alkmund’s Church, courtesy of the Reverend Richard Hayes and St Alkmund's PCC.  At a time when it looked as though Shrewsbury's only independent contemporary bookshop might go down, this proved a real refuge in a storm.  These days, however, Pengwern Books is thriving in Shrewsbury’s indoor market, a key part of its current renaissance, situated next to Julia Wenlock’s chocolate shop and a stone’s throw from the Bird’s Nest café.  

Susan talks to me about her life-long love of books. It was a family thing for her, growing up with books, learning to read them, discovering what she liked, making family trips to the library.  Her father loved books and would read anything. Her mother was not a reader, but was determined that Susan and her siblings should all read before they started primary school. Susan’s German mother, was great at celebrations, and books were usually a part of them.  Susan grew up to be a fast reader.  The reps are astonished, she says, at the speed with which she rattles through books.  Even when she’s not in the shop, books go on holiday with her.  One time, notably, she headed out to Greece with fourteen books, none of which - including Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling - were light reading, and returned with nothing unread.   

There's always something in Susan's shop-front display that draws one in. I hardly ever pass by Pengwern Books without wanting to buy something - and probably more than one something. This is in marked contrast to some book shops windows that leave me cold. Pengwern Books may be a small shop in terms of floor space, I suggest, but it packs a powerful punch.  How does Susan do it?

Susan laughs when I say that [and pushes her specs up on top of her head]. Strangely, she says she’s always reckoned window-dressing her weakest point.  ‘Having said that, I’d never knowingly buy an ugly book,’ she says.  ‘’Design is important.  The cover really matters. But when it comes to buying in stock - and to dressing my shop-front  - I go on gut instinct. I know my customers. I listen to what they have to tell me. I always have an eye for what they’ll like. But, even so, there’s no particular formula to it.'

Certainly Susan’s choices don’t come from reviews. Much to my surprise, given how quick she is at picking up the best of the new books, she mostly doesn’t read them. The reps will come in [‘I’m blessed with great reps,’ Susan says] and she’ll go through their lists saying no, no, no, don’t want, don’t want, no thanks, then suddenly there will be a hang on there, followed by a yes, I’ll take that one.

Susan works instinctively rather than on a rational basis.  Having said that, price is a big consideration.  It’s important to take in books that people can afford.  Susan tends not to stock hardbacks, though she makes a few exceptions, one being Matthew Sewell’s lovely Our Garden Birds.  ‘People want books as entertainment,’ Susan says.  ‘They don’t all want Booker prize winners.  Good writing doesn’t have to be unattainable. And just because it’s populist that doesn’t make it bad.’

I ask Susan to name a few books she’s read and would recommend.  Sophie McKenzie comes up first, with her novel Falling Fast.  It’s great for teens, Susan says, and great for anyone who’s interested in the subject of growing up.  The first novel by Annabel Pitcher, My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, is another quite amazing book, and Susan has a high regard for Dick Frances and what she calls ‘his intelligent, respectful writing’.  Then there’s Susan Cain's  Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking. Then there’s Raymond Feist’s The Magician, which should definitely be in everybody's Top 100 books, and the list goes on and on.

It can’t be easy being an independent in the currently unstable publishing market, struggling with the advent of e-books and the power of online buying, in particular from Amazon.  People are wondering if independent booksellers will soon be a thing of the past. Hard as it is to believe, there’s not a single independent bookshop in Birmingham.  However, this has turned book buying into a bit of a tourist industry, with people driving out from the city to enjoy the pleasure of sitting in, say, Anna Dreda’s Wenlock Books at Much Wenlock [a beautiful drive out, and a great destination] or Susan’s Pengwern Books in Shrewsbury Market.  There's nothing the online industry can offer that compares with finding a new favourite writer in a small curated shop with a well-read bookseller, especially one who has some idea of your taste.  

Pengwern Books has amassed many loyal customers over the years.  Some Susan says have passed on, others continue to come back wherever the shop is based. One customer used to ply Susan with chocolates on a weekly basis, and in the interests of not putting on the pounds had to be stopped.  There are customers who’ll come in for tea and a chat, and other customers whom Susan has met literally on the street outside her shop and persuaded to come in - and they’ve been coming in ever since.  ‘People either have to use their local bookshops, or they lose them,’ Susan says. 'It's as simple as that.'  And she's right.  Without independent bookshops, run by dedicated readers/booksellers, reading will become blander – and writing will too. This isn't just a story of big business taking over.  It's a story of a whole generation of writers being lost and their work disregarded.  Indeed, it’s the independents who’ve nursed the career of many of a writer through their troughs to their successes.  Hilary Mantel’s a good example. It’s far from certain that her publishers would have stuck by her without traditional bookselling keeping her in the public eye, or at least on the shelf.

But how to compete with the online market and the convenience of click-and-deliver shopping for those of us who don’t have the time to rifle and browse – or indeed to get in our car and drive out to the nearest indie bookshop? Susan has a cunning plan. 'Go to  www.hive.co.uk,’ she says.  It’s a massive online shop set up by Gardner's, one of the UK’s biggest book wholesalers, and the last of the independents.  They’ve provided an online platform for purchasing books, including e-books, music and DVDs.  ‘All you have to do,’ says Susan, ‘is set up an account, just as you would with Amazon, then you can choose your local bookshop as your nominated favourite store and a percentage of your purchases will go to them in exactly the way it would if you bought your book in their shop. It’s as easy as that.  You can buy online to your heart’s content, and have it delivered to your home, but you’re not doing down your local independent.  You’re actually helping it.  Of course, it's better for the shop if you visit them, but for those dedicated to online buying, or too far away to visit a favourite bookshop, there are deals to be had. And for those who arrange for delivery to their favourite indie bookshop, the postage comes for free.'*

Plainly you have to be ingenious to keep selling books these days. Susan has kept Pengwern Books alive for nine years now. Before that she worked for Powney’s Bookshop until it closed, and before that for Social Services, though her initial training was as a nurse. ‘I couldn’t have kept going without help,’ Susan says.’ My son, Ben Draper, has been pretty damned good, and so has Lorna Godwin, another ex-Powney's stalwart, who's forgotten more than I'll ever know. And Andrew Johnson and Hilary Hannaford worked with me for years, and I miss them more than I can say.’ 

Andrew added a knowledgeable breadth of history, politics and current affairs to the mix of books in Pengwern Books, and Hilary was brilliant at customer relations and the actual business of selling. ‘It’s all about customer relations,’ Susan says. ‘People think you can just set up and sell books and press the till, but there’s so much more than that to learn. Books are about people, and bookshops need to be too.  Even in my tiny shop I have room for an armchair and a kettle.  You have to get to know your customers in this business.  And Andrew and Hilary understood that.  They were a joy to work with and I’d have them back in a flash if I could.’

So what about the future, I ask. What next for Pengwern Books?  Susan recalls a ticketed author event that she put on when Pengwern Books was in Princess Street.  The author was Alan Titchmarsh and she had people with tickets queuing for half an hour beforehand in order to get a good seat, and others without tickets waiting on the street just to catch a glimpse of the great man.

‘I wouldn’t mind doing a few more events like that,’ Susan says.  ‘Also I do dream of having a café and gallery too.  There’s a great buzz here in the market and I’ve worked hard to raise its profile, but I need to focus now on my customers, and on myself.’  Susan’s thinking of diversifying.  She’d like to organize a little crime festival.  ‘Working the way I do is bloody hard sometimes,’ Susan says.  ‘But it’s worth it. I’m proud to see Pengwern Books still here, despite everything, doing what it always did.  If it’s out there, I’ll help people find the books they want. The written word is important.  I love what I do.’

Susan is a real presence in her shop. She’s extrovert and friendly, and she’ll find you a good read, whatever your interests. She speaks her mind, and is plainly not a woman to suffer fools gladly.  Her dedication to Pengwern Books is second to none.  Recently she had a short trip to hospital, but within hours was planning what tomorrow’s tasks would be and how quickly she could get out.  ‘But that’s what it’s like,’ she says, ‘when you’re running a business on your own.  There are some things no one can do for you.'   

It’s time to leave.  Susan and I have talked ourselves from sunshine to darkness in the space of a couple of hours.  In the front bar there’s been a birthday drink-up, but the drinkers have gone now, and anyway here in the back we’ve been nice and quiet.  We leave the pub to go our separate ways.  Susan is convinced I’m taking the wrong turn, but I insist I know where I’m going and I’ll be all right.  We’re two strong women who both love books. It’s been good to talk.  Goodnight, we say, goodnight.

 *PS: What Susan told me about Hive sounded  brilliant, so this morning I tried it out. I clicked the Hive link and up came its home page. I selected a book in my basket and was directed to open an account, giving me the option to choose my favourite bookshop. I selected Pengwern Books and up came everything I’d need to know, including opening times and a map. I proceeded to the checkout and was given the option of my book being delivered to Pengwern Books, or at home.  If I’d been at work during the day I’d have probably chosen Pengwern Books, but because I work from home, I chose home. After I’d bought my book, a message came up thanking me for supporting my local bookshop and assuring me that every time I made a purchase, regardless of whether it was delivered to the shop or at home, Pengwern Books would receive a percentage of the sale. 

I think this is absolutely brilliant, and recommend everybody reading this, who has a particular independent bookshop they'd like to support, to give it a go.  I now intend to go on my website and change the links on all my eleven novels, nominating Pengwern Books and directing them to www.hive.co.uk. 

PPS. In the short time it's taken to get this written and post it up, my first Hive order has arrived:

At My Window With A Broken Wing

Do you recognize the quote?  If you do, odds are that you belong to a certain generation, one for which the words of Bob Dylan speak for a surprising number of situations.

When I awoke yesterday morning,  here in my little house in the heart of Shrewsbury, I found a bird on my window sill. Upon closer examination, he wasn’t the raven of Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit’ [well, to be honest I could see that straight away], but neither was he an ordinary Shrewsbury bruiser of a pigeon.  He was too small and dainty - dove-grey with a slightly pinkish breast.  He had an air of dignity about him too - and that's not anything I've noticed in the local pigeon population.  No, whatever his species, this was a noble bird. You see what I mean by the way he holds his head. 

Later in the morning, setting up my bits and pieces of weaving equipment  on the front door step [so that I could take advantage of the sun whilst I worked] I discovered the bird down amongst the rose bushes.  The moment I brought out my big stripey sunshade, however, and opened it out, the 'raven' [I've decided to call him that out of deference to Dylan] fluttered up to perch in its shade on my railing, where it remained all day. 

One of the things I love about Shrewsbury is that immediately behind its main shopping streets, you'll find bees and flowers and every sort of bird from blue tits and dust-bathing sparrows to blackbirds who sing day and night, cormorants [down on the river ]and kingfishers - and now this tourist of a 'raven'.  I wonder what he makes of us all.  For most of yesterday, the two of us were only a foot or so away from  each other.  Occasionally I’d look up from weaving and there he would be, looking back at me.  I’d stop what I was doing and the two of us would take each other in.  I wondered what he saw.  I wondered what he was doing here. I wondered what had happened in his past to make him so comfortable with human company.  He didn’t look worried about anything. He didn't look sick.  His wings appeared to work. He hadn’t been shot.

At one point, wondering if he might be suffering from heat stroke, I brought out a bowl of water and put it down amongst the roses.  Then I broke up some bread and scattered it around.  The ‘raven’ ignored both.  Occasionally he would ruffle up his feathers, stand up, take a stretch, extend his neck, turn his head.  Then he would hunker down again.

At the start of my day's weaving, I worked quietly, afraid of startling a wild creature that had somehow lost its natural habitat.  But gradually I realized that sounds didn't  bother my 'raven'. Cars, radios, people walking, running, shouting as they passed – the most the ‘raven’ would do was occasionally peck its wings, as if pruning itself, but even then it didn’t look particularly bothered by the world around it.

Wouldn’t it be great if all wild birds were like that, and wild animals too – comfortable with our company, not startled by our presence, taking us in, happy to share their days with us, happy to do their own thing whilst we do ours, a companionable silence between us that speaks volumes for mutual respect?  Instead of which, no self-respecting wild bird or  creature will come within a mile of us, and the mere scent of a human sends them flapping and screeching off the other way.

In the evening the ‘raven’ dropped down to the rose bush, where I’d placed the water bowl, and flapped about. Then he flew up to where his day had started on my window sill.  His head went down, his feathers ruffled up and his neck disappeared into them.

That’s how I found him when I came downstairs today.  Still on the sill.  Eyes still open - but to all intents and purposes still asleep.  I made myself some coffee.  Cleared up last night’s meal.  When I looked again, the sun had risen over the rooftops and the ‘raven’ had gone.  Perhaps he had had the rest he needed and was heading home, like all those other tourists who come for a break to our beautiful old town and return home refreshed.

PS. In case you’re wondering, here’s Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero, No Limits, last verse:

 

The bridge at midnight trembles

The country doctor rambles

Bankers’ nieces seek perfection

Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring

The wind howls like a hammer

The night blows cold and rainy

My love she’s like some raven

At my window with a broken wing

A.E. Housman, Annie Cockburn and those Blue Remembered Hills

As if the last post wasn’t enough, here’s more summer lyricism from Shropshire, England. This time it comes from ten miles out of Shrewsbury.  For a while I’ve been thinking how good it would be to do a My Tonight From Shrewsbury outside broadcast [by which I mean outside of Shrewsbury broadcast] and where better than this?

I’m on the edge of the Long Mynd, looking down at the garden of Annie Cockburn, specialist in play therapy with troubled children, occasional belly-dancer [Annie loves to dance] and long time friend. Annie I first met back in the early Seventies as ex-Londoners and newcomers to the county.  Our children were born around the same time as each other and today we’ve been going through Annie’s albums, looking at her old photographs.  Over the years we’ve watched each other’s families grow up.  Now one of Annie’s sons is planning his wedding, and a couple of years ago one of my daughters celebrated hers in a marquee on this meadow, looking down upon Annie’s house, with the Lawley and Caradoc behind it.

The view here from Annie’s top meadow is world-class.  In the distance, rising out of the Shropshire Plain, is the Wrekin and beyond that, somewhere in a hazy green mist, is Shrewsbury.  In the field behind us, sheep are grazing and skylarks are singing high up in air. From where I’m standing, I can’t see the A49, nor can I hear it.  The only road I can see in this entire landscape is the lane running down the side of Annie’s house.  Drovers would have used it once to bring sheep off the Mynd. ‘We drove animals because it has always been this way for as far back as any of us can remember, as our father and grandfathers have done,’ I read earlier today, courtesy of the old Welsh drover, Mihangel Pritchard.  ‘We are drovers because it is in our blood, and being on those roads lifts our hearts and makes our spirits sing.  It is part of who we are as a people.’*  

Several times I’ve been here and seen Annie’s lane filled with sheep, though not driven from Cardigan, which is where Mihangel Pritchard would have started.  Those days are over now,  as is much of the old country way of life.  The barns and farmsteads remain though, as silent witnesses.  Annie’s barn stores lawn-mowers now, and garden chairs and the barbecue. Its upper section is used for parties and other social gatherings and it houses nesting swallows. Occasionally though, I’ve slept up there, and I swear I’ve awoken in the night to a scent in the air, lingering like the ghosts of long-forgotten harvests.  

Slowly Annie and I walk back down the fields towards her house.  We reach her garden and she opens the gate. In her early days here, there used to be hens picking the dry earth beside the pond, vegetables in rows between the apple trees and goats in the pig shed, waiting to be milked.  Now the dry earth has grassed itself over into a luxuriant lawn, the apple trees are an orchard and the goats are no more, not even chops in the freezer. 

But the pond remains unchanged, willows hanging over it, turquoise damsel-flies cruising its surface and lilies opening out in blossom.  It’s surrounded by yellow irises in bloom, dots of forget-me-not and as many kingcups as I’ve ever seen in one place.  Beyond the kingcups, a wilderness of monkey flowers – planted in the pond as just one single stem –  tumble in bright yellow profusion, dotted with pinkish grasses known in flowering time as Yorkshire fog.

This is the perfect month to be in Annie’s garden.  All her roses are out, and some of their scents - especially the intensely pink roses along the front of the house - are deep enough to drown in and strong enough to carry you away.

Annie’s always trying to find ways to share her garden and land.  The sun only has to be predicted by the weatherman and she’s on the phone.  ‘Why don’t you come over? It’s going to be a perfect day.’  Sometimes she’s right, but not always.  Today, however, she is spot on. We sit on her terrace, sheltering from the hot sun under a huge umbrella held steady with a shoe.  We’re eating thick slabs of granary toast and scrambled eggs, washed down with home-made nectarine wine and strawberries and ice-cream.  There’s not a cloud in the sky.  This is England at her most beautiful.  Shropshire in her summer colours.  And what colours they are - green upon green, the white of wild roses up against the heady white of elderflowers, sunshine upon foxgloves, dots of yellow buttercups just about everywhere. 

Once every other year, Annie’s sons put together a little music festival on this land, bringing together bands and musicians who happen to be friends from as far away as Leeds and Cardiff.  This is a private family event, no Glastonbury here, but tents will go up in the fields – and a few hammocks– a bonfire will be lit and there’ll be barbecueing and music. Annie’s ex-husband Bob will come up from Hastings to perform with his guitar.  Their son’s band, The Seven Inches, will sing their own idiosyncratic and highly original songs, and my family’s own small band, fronted by my husband, will bring to life an eclectic mix of blues and folk with a bit of doo-wop jazz thrown in. 

It’s all fairly homespun, just people who like each other getting together - in some cases growing old together, in others growing up together and doing it in a spectacular landscape. All over Shropshire, people have their rituals; their ways of marking the changing seasons and enjoying the land. Part of the beauty of Shrewsbury is its surrounding landscape.  Often people drive through it, heading for Wales, no idea what they are leaving behind.  For those who linger, however, the fundamental elements of the landscape are recognizably the same as when the poet, A.E. Housman, wrote wistfully about the county in the early part of the 20^th century.  ‘A Shropshire Lad’ he called his book of verse, and if Housman were to come back now, even though he'd find the way of life very different, this would still be his Shropshire - just as it’s mine.   I moved here forty years ago, a young woman without roots, raised a family and found a home.

Here’s Housman on the subject of Blue Remembered Hills:

Into my heart an air that kills,

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went,

And cannot come again.

* When I can locate the name of the Mihangel Pritchard book, I'll put the details here.  

La Vie en Rose, in Shrewsbury

I have roses on my mind. For a couple of weeks now, walking around Shrewsbury, their scents have been wafting towards me.  They're in the Dingle. They're in that Quarry bed up by the main gates. Crossing St Alkmund’s Square, I catch the scent of them and find as delicate a yellow rose as I’ve ever seen anywhere.  Next to it, I find a cluster of fluffy pink bush-roses on tiny, graceful stalks.  Then, passing St Julian’s, I look up to find flame-red climbers gracing the church wall.  Then on the convent wall, behind Old St Chad’s, I find blowsy pink roses nearly past their best, though with a few buds still to open out. 

By now I've reached the top of Belmont Bank. I stand still and  smell the roses but can’t figure out where their scent is coming from.  I look around.  Where are they?  I walk on, but still I can’t locate them.   

They talk about Shrewsbury being a town of flowers.  Some flowers I actively dislike [begonias to name just one] but I love it that in a busy town centre with cars passing by you can still stop at the scent of a rose and look around to see where it is.  Closer to home, I only have to open the gate into my daughter’s garden and it’s as if I’ve lifted the glass stopper on a bottle of perfume.  And even closer still, outside my own house, a rose bush my husband and I bought one year at the Shrewsbury Flower Show is spreading across our old brick wall, scattering its blooms like stars.  

I’ve been out this morning tying them back.  Is this a particularly good year for them, I wonder, or is it just that I’m noticing them more for some reason? I ask Joyce of Lulu Flowers, and she reckons it’s a good year, courtesy of all that rain.  I’m in her shop now, having a cup of tea, and it’s not just roses I can smell - it’s sweet peas too, and stock, sweet william and peonies. 

Joyce’s shop is full of smells, and on every side of me are beautiful blooms, velvet-red roses and snow-white ones, bright green shamrock crysanthemums, and pink, strangely plastic-looking anthurriums,  sweet-smelling freesias, flame-coloured Peruvian lilies - which Joyce describes as good ‘doers’, whatever that means - then stocks, huge pink peonies and a tumbling cascade of tiny purple flowers called lisianthus.

Joyce has had Lulu Flowers for five years now.  She sells vintage items as well as flowers - household items mostly, and they obviously bring in the trade because in the sort time it takes to drink my first cup of tea a couple of customers have come in for conversations with Joyce, either wanting to sell her or buy vintage items. 

Joyce came to floristry from working for a wholesaler importing carnations, and to that from gardening, and to gardening as an antidote to her life as a biker chick.  You think you know people, but so often you don’t.  I’ve been coming into Joyce’s shop since she took it on, but I’ve never seen the biker in her.  Yet here we are discussing Norton Commandos and Kawasaki ZL1000 [the Eliminator, in case you’re interested] and the bikes she and husband Terry keep in their enormous garage but no longer take out on the road. 

Joyce left Shrewsbury when she was young, thinking it had nothing to keep her here.  In her day she’s been a member of the all-girl bike group, the Amazons, and a biker rock chick in one of the big biker gangs.  Terry was in a biker gang as well, too, though he's not any more.  He’s a Shrewsbury man, but it was biking that brought him and Joyce together.

What happens to bikers when they give up the bikes, I want to know [buying flower shops, you have to admit, isn’t the first thing that comes to mind].  Joyce says she bought a nippy little Mazda - the RX8 - a bit like a go-kart is how she describes it.  ‘It has a rotary engine, massive horse-power and small CC,’ Joyce says.  'You had to know how to drive it.'  The last time Terry took it out, he succeeded in writing it off, putting on a performance of almost theatrical scale, skidding on the old A5 and ending up [though not ending up, if you see what I mean] in the cemetery, perched on a bank above a row of graves.

I thought I’d come in for a nice chat about roses, and here I am talking about engines, accidents and graves. And that’s the quiet part of Joyce’s life.  I’m beginning to get the feeling she has quite a story to tell.  Certainly, she admits, she had a tumultuous decade during her biker days, awash with accidents, injury and ill-health.  All of this started with her mother’s death when she was eighteen. It was that that loosened her connection with Shrewsbury.

Joyce is a Shrewsbury girl from a Shropshire and predominantly Shrewsbury background, and it means everything to her to have returned to her roots.  Her mum grew up in Astley, near Hadnall, and worked for Silhouette.  Her dad lived in Belle Vue.  His memories included cycling up Wyle Cop as a bakers’ boy, and working at the Lion Hotel as a hotel porter.  Joyce’s nan worked at the Gala bingo hall just down the road from where we are now, and her grandfather was a train driver in the days of steam.  Typically of Shrewsbury, she and Terry discovered when they got together that his dad had worked on the steam trains too – as stoker to Joyce’s grandfather. But then that's Shrewsbury for you. It’s a town whose roots go deep and wide.

Joyce first heard rumours on the Shrewsbury grapevine that Lulu Flowers might up for sale. Her father had died and she’d come into an inheritance. Suddenly it seemed to her that a floristry shop was just what she wanted.  Not only that, but an ex-colleague and talented florist, Sherlie Haycox [who has been at Lulu Flowers ever since] was looking for work too.

There was a magic moment when these things all came together.  Joyce describes it now as going mad. The shop came up, and she bought it.  She might have been to floristry college, but she’d no experience of running a business. However, she knew what she wanted, and  she knew that working for herself would suit a strong-willed person like herself, who had never been much good at taking instructions and liked to do things her own way. Liked following her gut instincts too.

‘I wanted to create a shop that in some way reflected me,’ Joyce says.  ‘I’m a very English girl at heart, I love the countryside on the outskirts of Shrewsbury and I wanted my shop to be English, flowery, natural and, I guess, feminine.  But I wanted to mix things up a bit as well. I’m not a person who likes to keep things simple, and Lulu Flowers had a vintage side as well, and that mix is why I went for it.’ 

Back in those days, Lulu Flowers was situated in School Gardens, tucked away behind Castle Gates.  Now it’s on Castle Street in a prime position just down from Marks & Spencer's on the other side of the road.  ‘When I come back from being away,’ Joyce says, ‘I'm overwhelmed with how pretty my shop is, and absolutely thrilled at what I’ve achieved.  When I’m here all the time, though, I wish that I was tidier. I’ve always got a hundred jobs to do,  and I’m always busy and it shows.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I like every day being different, and in a shop like this it is.’

I wander around the shop.  Behind the counter are an assortment of clipboards full of notes, scissors, pots, bows, raffia and rolls of celophane. Then mixed up with the flowers and plants is an assortment of vintage stuff - pretty tea and coffee sets, old ornamental vases, pots and jugs, original paintings and interesting-looking old photographs.  There’s a series of cigarette cards mounted and hanging in one window - the History of Naval Dress, I see as I look closer - and a dolls’ house in the other, made by John Davies of Shrewsbury, bids accepted for charity, and it’s reached the £200 mark so far.

There are also a number of bird boxes dotted about.  I notice a bat box, an owl box and a fancy-bird feeding observatory. These are made by the company E.G. Wildhouse, run by Edward Giles, ex of Shrewsbury School, who has spent his university college holidays making them. They're lovely things. The bird-feeding observatory has a camera set into its tiny slate roof so that back in the comfort of home, it's possible to watch what’s going on in the bird-feeding world.

And Joyce's world, I wonder. What does she do when she’s not in the shop?  She and Terry have a place in Criccieth, she says.  She loves going down there, loves the beach and the open sky.  She’s always loved that sense of sky above her head.  She’s done a bit of travelling in her time – Australia, the Far East, New York.  When she came back to Shrewsbury from New York, she couldn’t get over how close the sky was. She feels in touch with the natural world here. And that’s important to Joyce.

On her counter, I notice a note to self about Saturday flowers.  Every week one of her customers has flowers sent to her mother, who lives in a nursing home.  That’s a nice idea, Joyce and I agree.  Another nice idea is Lonely Bouquet Day when florists not just in the UK but right across the world, from California to Singapore, not leaving out the Scilly Isles, Yorkshire and, of course, Shrewsbury, leave bouquets around their towns, to be picked up by whoever finds them.  Joyce did this last Saturday, which was International Lonely Bouquet Day.  Flowers  free to a good home were left outside the library, the Old Market Hall and even on the outskirts of town.  I hope I can make you smile, and you will please take me home, announced the docket with the bouquet, and there was a Facebook link in case  people wanted to photo their bouquets in their own homes and share them around.   

Joyce is full of stories. Some of them are of hard times.  What she went through in her biker days would set your hair on end. She describes Terry as her rescuer, who came to bring her home when things got bad.  She’s a Shrewsbury lass through and through, and it’s entirely fitting that she’s created her business in the heart of a town to which her family have been connected for generations.  

Joyce is great with words, by which I don’t mean that she talks a lot [which she’s certainly capable of doing] but that she uses exactly the right words to get across what she wants to say. She’s forthright and honest and can’t help but tell a thing as it is. Honesty’s my affliction, is how she puts it, and later, talking about the human scale of things here in Shrewsbury, and about the town rooting her and keeping her safe, she talks about the river holding everything in a fixed hug.

If you’ve ever seen a map of Shrewsbury, wrapped around by the River Severn, you’ll know what Joyce means.  And if you live here you’ll know.  Suddenly I find myself back to La Vie en Rose again, which is where I began.  I’ve come a long way round, but here we are.  When he takes me in his embrace, I see life as through rose-tinted spectacles, sings Edith Piaf [probably terrible translation but best I can do].  And you can hear her sing it, if you want.  Watch her face as she sings it in this really lovely clip. Watch her hands.  HERE’S THE LINK.   

 

HERE'S the Lulu Flowers Facebook page

HERE'S the Lulu Flowers website

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