‘I think you should get one up sooner or later and strike while the iron’s hot.’
'I don't know. The whole point was that I don't know what I'm doing with my life. How do you make content about not having content?'
'People clearly want to see that journey.'
‘I guess.’
‘Don’t do anything rash. I’ll speak to you later. I’m just getting into the car and it will cut over as it switches to the car system and I need to phone Jack.’
‘Okay, yes, see you later.’
Pondering what to do, Darby took a sip of tea and seriously considered deleting the whole thing. However, the fact that people appeared to have been helped by her mutterings about toast and empty rooms felt good. And wasn’t that, well, to be quite frank, rather extraordinary? Sighing, she mulled it over.It was all a bit overwhelming. She liked things small and manageable, but now, quite without meaning to, she’d wandered into something big. It was funny because the whole point of it had started as a way for her not to wither away. It had done that and then some.
With her mind galloping off ahead, she tried to just roll with it. The truth was, she’d been feeling, nottotallylost, but certainly untethered for a long time. And now here was this thing that could be a start of something, well,positive. Not only was it probably good for her, but it wasn’t that hard at all. Working with a wall and a dog had given her quite a good grounding in chatting to something or someone who didn’t respond. She’d literally flicked her camera on her phone, pressed go and off she’d gone.
Before she could talk herself out of anything, she pulled her phone towards her, tapped through, read a few more messages and pursed her lips. What could possibly go wrong? As Lily had said, she didn’t have anything to lose.
Conversing with Lola, she smiled. ‘We won’t delete it and we will decide to take on this as if it is a course or something. Yes, every day is a school day. I will learn something from this and I will grow. Like a sunflower, I will reach to the sky and bloom.’
Lola blinked, sighed, shifted and closed her eyes as if she’d heard it all before and really could not be bothered to listen to anything else. Starting to scroll through her camera roll, Darby noted a few videos she would be able to use for the second vlog upload. She watched a few and then tapped on the one with the flour incident. Pressing pause, she may have enlarged Archie’s face and other parts of his biological makeup. Hello, broad shoulders. Feeling her face heat just thinking about what he must have thought of the crazed flour-covered woman with the smoke detector going off and old banger of a car, she shuddered.
Transferring more clips into the editing app, she told herself she was only going to fiddle for a bit, maybe put something together, see how it looked and go from there. It didn’t take long before she was lost in a world of her own; snipping messy bits, adding a few captions, softening the lighting so the kitchen looked cosier than it did in real life. By the time she’d got a half-coherent video together, a good hour or more had gone by, and the morning had stretched towards lunchtime. She sat back and watched it play through. It was so very far from polished, but it was most certainly honest. If she’d learned anything over the time that the first video had been accidentally beaming its way into people’s lives, it was that people seemed to like the truth.
Clicking to upload the video to the app, although not publishing yet and before she could change her mind, she spoke to her old friend, the kitchen wall. ‘Right then. Yes, I have finally gone to the dogs, but I am going to go for it. Let’s see what happens next.’
15
To Darby, the Pretty Beach hospice shop smelled of lavender candles, hoovering and memories, some hers, mostly other people’s. Hoovering? Really? Yes, that sort of smell when you’ve hoovered for hours and it smells clean, but somehow it’s still a bit dusty or something. Since moving to Pretty Beach, Darby had visited the hospice shop in the old town many, many, many times. To the point where visiting it, perusing it and nigh-on stalking it had become her one and only hobby. This regular visitation had resulted in her having a plethora of good finds, both practical, absolutely impractical, brain-related, home-related, vintage and non-vintage under her belt.
Really, it had to be said that she loved the place; it was the sort of old-school charity shop where everything was shoved in via a strange kind of organised chaotic system that no one, least of all her, could really make head nor tail of. Not a curated, shudder, charity shop whereby someone had written the brand on the tag in scrawly writing, just in case, you know, you hadn’t been able to work that out for yourself. Or worse, when the writing on the tag informed you quite seriously that the item you were looking at was new. Nope, it was a regular old charity shopthrough and through. Oh, how Darby Lovell adored that to her core.
Like a lot of things in Pretty Beach, the hospice shop was old-fashioned in both its aesthetics and its values, which worked for Darbs. Those same values and suchlike were the very reasons she’d fallen for the little town and had decided to plump all her money into it in the first place.
Also, it was not laced with woke afflictions. It did not profess loudly by way of posters, iPads balanced on shelves, or any other means, digital or not, that shopping there would save the environment. Instead, it just did what it said on the tin, yes indeed it did. Oh-so-delightful vintage crockery sat next to abandoned exercise equipment, baskets of wool were shoved on top of piles of books and stacks of beach paraphernalia sat on an old stripped pine dresser. Darby absolutely adored the little place and could never ever resist dipping in to see what she might come across. Which was one of the reasons her house needed a dirty great declutter. Getting lost in searching for treasure was, for Darby, a very cheap and extremely accessible form of therapy that worked very well for her.
She'd been going to the shop more regularly than was really humanly decent since moving to Pretty Beach and felt almost as if the place had become a friend. There were many reasons she loved it; partly budget, or lack thereof, and the gigantic thrill of the delicious hunt in charity shop browsing. There was a lot to be said for that. If you’ve not felt it before, go forth and dig.
Today's mission was a little bit different to her usual one; video content for her channel. It sounded strange that she had a channel, but it was nothing if not true. It wouldn’t be very long and nothing dramatic, and for sure, she wasn’t actually going to attempt filming herself in the shop or anyone who might be in there. She had decided that a little bit of filming and mooching would slot quite nicely into a vlog if and when she decided to popup her next one. She loved the shop and assumed that the forty to seventy-year-old women who watched her channel would too.
Taking a few steps past a rack of scarves, she smiled on spotting Anna, one of the volunteers. Over the years Darby had lived in Pretty Beach, she’d got to know the rotating cast of volunteer staff in the hospice shop who took their roles very seriously. Today's guardian, Anna, was almost as round as she was high, had a mug of tea in her hand and a bubble of jet-black hair on her head.
Anna beamed. 'Morning, Darby. How are you? Goodness, what have you done? You’re looking well. It’s lovely to see you again.’
‘Hi. Nice to see you.’ Darby put her phone back in her pocket. There was no way she’d be filming in front of Anna. ‘What have you been up to?’
Anna raised her eyes and pondered for a second. ‘Not a lot. I’m looking forward to our week in Lanzarote. It’s been so cold here, hasn’t it? I bet your place has been nippy.’
‘It’s been really cold, yep. We had that warm week and now this. I sometimes feel as if my house never warms up, you know?’
Anna clucked her tongue behind her teeth. ‘Those old houses with their thick walls have never been warm if you ask me. They won’t be falling down in one of our coastal storms, though, so you’re safe there.’
‘Good to know. So, you're off to get some sun, are you?’
‘Oh, yes, we go to the same room in the same hotel, in the same resort every single year. We’ve been going there since our honeymoon.’
‘Lucky you! I’m not jealous at all.’ Darby joked. Really, inside, she wasn’t that fussed about going to the Canary Islands, although any holiday to her looked fairly attractive. A week off in a tent was about all she’d be doing, though.
‘Ahh, I’ll put you in my suitcase. Although, have you seen all the anti-tourist stuff going on? Sometimes, I think I’ll keep my money and just stay here. After all the money I’ve given to the place over the years. It makes you wonder…’
