This is an unusually long post for me. But then it's a long story....
Early this year, perhaps it was February, I went out to lunch with my Dad, his friend Pam and their 89 year old friend called June.
June is a widow who wears colourful clothing, tells colourful tales and calls everyone "dear".
And I adore her.
Anyway, on this particular occasion she told me she'd recently bought a handbag from a garden centre but realised when she got it home that she didn't like it:
"I can't get on with it, dear," she said, "would you like it? To raise money for that lovely church?"
She meant the baroque church in Great Witley, which badly needs a new roof.
I said yes, thinking I could use it as a raffle prize.
Until, a couple of days later, I finally saw it.
It was truly horrible. A nasty yellow colour, funny sticky-out bits on shiny brown handles, a long purse contraption which doubled as a closing clasp. Awful. No one would want to win it in a raffle. No one.
So I hatched a plan and put it on eBay (with June's permission, dear) with a no-holds barred write-up. I described it as a bag with no redeeming features, the worst I'd ever seen.
Local BBC radio picked up the story, interviewed June and myself and raised the profile and the bidding in the process. We made £28. And I got rid of the bag.
Perfect.
A week later I received an email from a lady I didn't know. She told me her husband had bought the bag having heard us on the radio. He'd been on his tractor at the time, somewhere in Gloucestershire, and he bought it as a joke. She told me she was now re-auctioning it for a cloth-nappy library charity. It made £24 and was bought by a lady in Norway.
Janicke's daughter had been born prematurely. She re-auctioned it on eBay for the neonatal unit which had saved her life and made £94.
At this point it gets complicated. However it's now in Newcastle upon Tyne and being sold by a lady with an incredible story of her own:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ugly-Yellow-Handbag-raising-money-for-Cancer-Patients-/261955062872
