The Turbulant Trek – Pasties

So here I was in Dorchester. A market town. My Big Issue pitch was sandwiched between Marks and Spencer’s and a pasty shop.

This would prove to be problematic.

When living in a hostel in Plymouth, the food they served up was, in general, the ‘rejects’ donated from a local pie factory. So, pretty much every meal consisted of a misshapen or slightly burnt sausage roll, pie or pasty. Consequently, I grew to hate them. Pasties especially. However they come; rough puff, shortcrust, cheese and onion, beef and stilton or even the traditional Cornish. I hate the taste, the smell, the shape. I can’t even stand the sight of the damn things.

Yes, with my pitch now slap bang next to a pasty shop, it soon became apparent I had a problem. My first ‘donation’ came only two hours after I’d set up pitch. Selling my wares, innocently going about my business, a lady walked purposefully towards me, excitedly waving a bag. As she presented it to me, I instinctively held out my hand. Slapping the bag into my palm, she proclaimed, ‘Here you are love, a nice hot pasty. That should keep you going.’ Then briskly strode off. Aghast, I just stood there, dazed, arm outstretched, with the ‘thing’ peering at me through the end of its bag.
With another four pasties arriving on my pitch that very same day, all accepted with feigned gratitude and a polite grimace, I realised the problem was far greater than I could cope with. After careful consideration, I decided honesty was indeed the best policy.
The following day, my first pasty arrived at the seemingly bizarre and most unexpected time of 9.30am. Slightly taken aback, I soon gathered myself enough to remember the previous evening’s well practiced lines. Huge smile. Shoulders back. Here we go! ‘Thank you so much for thinking of me, it’s a wonderful gesture, but the truth is, I don’t actually like pasties.’

I knew instantly, and it’s something that even now still haunts me and something I should have foreseen. My polite refusal was one huge, glaringly huge mistake (a mistake I would never make again). As my customer held aloft the now surplus pasty, as she slowly grasped what I’d just said, her kindly face took on a sort of confused astonishment, then turned to one of hurt and rejection. Mine took on a genuinely pained expression of guilt, thinking, how could I have been so bloody selfish! It would appear I still had a problem. One I was desperate to solve.
Whilst I was grateful for people’s compassion and generosity, I was stuck firmly in an eternal pasty triangle. One I had no control over. The pasty shop owner was doing very nicely, the donors were walking off with a spring in their step having done their good deed for the day, and I was left with a steaming pile of short-crusted pasty to dispose of. Yes, there had to be a solution, but I just couldn’t work out what it might be.

After a week or so, with the days becoming increasingly colder, the lower the temperature got, the busier the pasty traffic      became. Then, in a flash, it came to me. A solution! OK, on the surface, one that might appear a tad dishonest, a bit underhand, but it was, I believe, the only course of action to get me out of this predicament. All I needed was for the pasty shop owner to agree. Thankfully, after explaining the situation, he did.
Because most donors would enter his shop asking to purchase a pasty for the Big Issue man, he would, from thereon, give them ‘Graham’s pasty,’ already bagged up in the display cabinet. On donating the pasty to me, once the donor had left, I would then return the pasty to the shop, receiving a 50p refund, whilst ’Graham’s Pasty’ was returned to the cabinet waiting to be purchased by the next donor. Yes, a little underhand but what else could I do?
Dorchester, although a vibrant town with a lovely community, it did, in the first few days, deliver the odd insult. My ’A’ board, normally proving more than capable at seeing them off, this time actually caused one.

A lady, not quite getting it, walked up and rather angrily  stated, ’There’s nothing wrong with  being smart you know!’ ’I’m sure there’s not madam’ I replied, pointing to my sign saying, ‘it’s just a play on words madam, a kind of joke.’ ‘Yes’ she replied. ‘A joke on decent, hardworking people!’ Ouch!

For me though, the bigger ouch was to come some time later, an insult that knocked me for six and instantly finished my day. I was witnessing first hand, the baton of bigotry being handed down to the next generation.

A man walked past with his young, six or seven year old child. The child, on seeing me, asked his father ‘what’s that man doing daddy?’ He responded with, ‘very little son, very little.’ Witty,  clever and absolutely soul destroying

An insult; the first and the last, that would see me completely lose it. I won’t go into detail.

I had no set plans to do any fundraising in Dorchester. After the amazing experience of Totnes, I was once again, just trying to get by. But with wonderful customers, developing friendships and perhaps spurred on by the most pernicious insult I’d had, I came up with a plan. I wasn’t just going to do very little; I was going to do a lot!
It was 1998. The cost of mobile phones were quite expensive with call charges costing 40-50p a minute. Prohibitive to most Big Issue vendors living on the streets. My goal was to attempt to raise funds to purchase 8 phones, pre–loaded with 1,000 minutes, giving vendors the opportunity to perhaps contact loved ones or family over Christmas.
With the help of the local media and the unbound generosity of the local community, by mid December, my goal was met and I duly posted the phones to the Bristol Big Issue office where they were distributed to every office throughout the South West. I was beyond thrilled.
It was now time to move on to continue my trek. There were things to do. I needed to be in Penzance.