Dave’s Bunting
I don’t always smith on my own. There are some festivals where my blacksmith friend Dave has come with me and then we alternate workshops so it’s pretty much pot luck who gets to work with whom. He knows the score on my bartering policy and works along with it.
He’d been doing a workshop with an obviously well-off young woman and, delighted with the hook she’d made, she offered to pay him £20. He explained our bartering system, and that we didn’t accept cash so she went off, a bit perplexed, to find her trade.
He wasn’t there when she came back and left her barter for him – a polaroid photograph of bunting!
“Bloody hell, I wish I’d taken the twenty quid now” he complained when he reappeared.
But that’s the point – it really made us laugh and gave us a great tale – and I wish we’d framed it to hang in the workshop alongside the other bits and bobs. It’s really not about the money, and the retelling of the story alone has been worth much more than that lost twenty quid!
Kate The Wordsmith 