Collett Park, Coffee and Community!

Well, here I am working away on the new website for The Collett Park Festival, that I offered to do for free, as a part of my contribution to the Shepton Mallet community. I did promise, when I resigned, that I would use my social media skills and communication knowledge to help this town regenerate. I've already created a website for Shepton Mallet Shops, which you can look at here. Tonight, all alone in my shop, with the lights on low, I am building a website for Collett Park Festival, which is going to open with a free musical concert at 7pm on Friday June 13th! You can look at the new website here, hope you like it. I am getting so excited about it!

Anyway, the lights are dim and the rain is pouring down and I look up to see a shadowy figure in the doorway who looks almost as if he is going to bed down for the night, he is wearing a mac, has an extremely long beard, like a wizard, a very large black umbrella and a stick and he is looking into a plastic yellow and white carrier bag and rummaging around, hunched over concentrating and rummaging and looking more and more suspicious!

Eventually, I decide that I am carefully going to go up to him and ask him, quietly, 'What are you doing?'. He looks up at me, in a lovely way and shows me some 'Then and Now' postcards of Shepton Mallet. He tells me that he has to visit the places on the postcards as that is what he likes doing. So, even though it's dark and raining, he goes off and matches the pictures in the postcards, to the pictures in real life and I invite him to pop in after he has finished for a hot chocolate and brownie, on the house, even though we are closed, just because.

He's in here now chatting away over his hot chocolate and a brownie, telling me all about his adventures in Glastonbury and Street and how he missed his bus and had to get a lift back to Shepton Mallet in a police car. I asked him if he had absconded from an old people's home but he explained that they actually let him come back quite late and that he would never stay in an old people's home that wouldn't let him stay out late. He asked me how old I thought he was and I guessed 80 years old, then I was really worried I had gone too high but then he said that he's 86! Phew. He's a sprightly thing for that age, walking all around Glastonbury and Street.

I love having a cofffee shop and being in the centre of the community and meeting the people that we do.