Stephen Holland runs Page 45, a comic shop in Nottingham, England, with Mark Simpson and Tom Rosin. He has a monthly column in Comics International, and appears perennially as a small Japanese Maple in West Bridgford.
Who is... Alan Donald?
In his dreams Alan Donald is a multi-award winning writer of comic books, animation, theme park shows and rides, children’s books, novels, television, internet animation and more.
In real life Alan writes this column, which has been described as more than a lifestyle than a weekly column. He used to write SBC's All The Rage.
Where was I? I wrote part one of this tale nearly six months ago but with one thing and another (and I was supposed to have got a different column out last week!)…
…give me a second to gather my thoughts. We’d gotten the money, I’ve discussed Dawn being attacked and I’d briefly mentioned about all this being an apology to a vast range of people.
Part two starts in Cornwall. No, wait, rewind – we’ll start in the World Heritage City of Bath.
We were really struggling financially. We’d had a variety of jobs between us; Dawn and I had spent the best part of a year as Assistant Managers of a hotel (18-20 hour days, 6-7 days a week, great fun…); I’d managed burger shops; I’d done a stack of office jobs; and Dawn had realised that she really couldn’t cope at work without me there. I just couldn’t settle; qualifications, skills, but no idea. Combine that with student debts etc. and you get the picture.
We’re starting in Bath. Lovely City, you should visit.
After a long and drawn out period of uncertainty Dawn was finally going to get to speak to the Criminal Injuries Compensation people in court. This had been delayed and mucked about with so many times that we could hardly believe we were there. She had been made initial offers that our lawyer considered to be insulting, more tests were requested and loads of letters were sent. Finally, Dawn’s day in court. Alone. Not even our lawyer was allowed in with her. She was drilled and pulled apart by the committee but in the end she got through it. We had a decision and a final sum of money. The cash was a fraction of what high profile cases with far less injuries have gotten but it was quite a bit of money for us.
We left the court and the lawyer treated us to tea at the Sally Lunn Tea Room (a lawyer buying his clients anything! We’re pretty sure the bill actually appeared as part of his invoice); and that was that. Dawn, her father and I wandered through the beautiful streets of Bath kinda shell-shocked to be at the end of it all. We were driven home (we couldn’t afford a car at that time and I only had a motorbike to get around on) and celebrated… that was the plan, in reality we started to celebrate and then decided it was better to just forget about the whole thing for a while, the reality of being at the end of it was sinking in whilst Dawn was still suffering due to the attack.
A couple of weeks later we decided to go to Cornwall to stay with Dawn’s Nan.
Cornwall is without doubt one of the finest places on Earth (and this is a Scot talking). The peace, quite, tranquillity and pace of life was such that we could just switch off and relax. We always stay in the wonderful village of St. Agnes.
The area I think of as St. Agnes is made up of several villages and hamlets (Goonown, Petersville, St. Agnes, Trevaunance and Goonbell). The whole place is like a step back in time with stone cottages and a laid back approach to life. We borrowed my Mum’s car for the week but whilst in the village we generally walked everywhere. Nan’s cottage sits at the top of a steep hill on a tight road. The first thing we always do when we go down there is to walk through the village and see what has changed.
We sauntered down the hill to the book shop, picked up a couple of novels each and then continued down further into the village. This is a lovely walk (and it is even nicer now with many of the new shops they have) and we didn’t have a care in the world. We stopped at the butchers and priced up our dinner for the following night and then continued down the hill. Along the way we stopped and looked at the price of houses.
House prices were extremely variable with those in the St. Agnes area being quite pricey whilst just a few miles away the price dropped off dramatically. We looked and moved on, it was a relaxing routine. We looked through the window at an antiques shop, walked down past Stippy-Stappy (you might not know the name but you’ll know the houses, a series of houses built as a terrace down an extremely steep hill; they look like a set of stairs built out of houses) and on to Trevaunance Cove. There we walked along the beach, watched the sun set and hugged. Right on the beach there is a lovely restaurant with big windows looking over the sea. We had dinner, a bottle of wine and talked about nothing. Almost nothing… one topic that kept on coming up was how nice it would be to stay down in Cornwall forever.
At this point I’m guessing you’re wondering when I’m going to get to the whole comicbook shop thing. We’ll get there, take it easy. If it is any consolation to you the books I bought when we got to St. Agnes were Knightfall by Denny O’Neil (actually not bad, a few odd moments but several times it is actually extremely clever and it shows what Denny’d like to do with the Bat if his hands were completely untied) and The Death of Superman (sorry I’ve forgotten the author, I won’t pass judgement on this one… lets just say I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped I would). AND we visited a cool little comicbook stall in Truro.
It was a wonderful week. We started it in a relaxed fashion and ended it frantic. At some point our pipe dream seemed to become reality. We were sat on a beach with one of Dawn’s cousins in a bar, in the rain and at that point we decided to just do it. For three days we trawled estate agents and visited houses. We narrowed our search down to a few towns, Redruth became a favourite.
Like I said the cash we had wasn’t a huge sum but it was a good start and if you are prepared to look you can find some very cheap houses. We did find a very cheap house; we needed an extra £8,000 to buy it and about £4,000 to make it liveable in. We put an offer in, it was accepted and we went back home to sort out the details. The main detail to sort out was that £12,000 short fall.
We could have got a loan from any company, we realise that now. We said the loan was for home improvements rather than to buy a house which was daft (don’t ask us why, we just, stupidly, thought there’d be more chance of us getting the loan that way…d’oh!). Our credit rating was nil (or worse) and with our stupid tack on trying to get the loan we were stuffed. What do you do when you’re in a hole? Turn to the parents…please can you guarantor a loan for us…
One set of parents agreed but wanted more details, the other flat out said no. Why? Mundic - concrete cancer - an affliction common in houses of a certain age in Cornwall. That is why the house was so cheap. This didn’t mean the house would fall down in the next few years (it had about a century in it) but it did mean that it would need some work done on it in the future (work that would lead to the house’s value increasing 4 or 5 fold). One set of our parents talked and talked to us until we came to the decision that they knew more than we did and that perhaps we shouldn’t throw all our money into a potentially terrible investment.
We withdrew from the sale of the house, paid off some debts and enjoyed having that cash in the bank.
What to do? Cash needing an investment, makes no sense to just fritter it away. A house would have been ideal but…
We had just come through a bad spell financially. We had spent a year without comic books. We had money, we started to collect again…but we were so far behind! One night we lay in bed and I joked that if we owned a comic book shop we’d never fall behind like that again.
