Читать книгу A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas! - Trisha Ashley - Страница 17

Q: What do you get if you eat Christmas decorations?

A: Tinselitis!

Mercy had a few calls to make and emails to send and told me to help myself to whatever I fancied for lunch in the kitchen and she would make herself something when she’d finished.

‘Breakfast and lunch are always whatever comes to hand, and Silas won’t join us – he has become addicted to meals from a service that brings frozen food and Job will have popped one into the microwave in his kitchenette, though he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself. Truth to be told, I think he prefers his ready meals to my home cooking!’

‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ I said.

‘No, but a family should eat together at least once a day, that’s so important. Besides, I can’t let him turn into a complete hermit.’

I made myself a cheese sandwich and followed it with a crunchy apple from the fruit bowl, and Mercy, when she came down again, opened a tin of pea and ham soup.

‘Well, we’d better go and look at Randal’s proposals, hadn’t we?’ she said with her inexhaustible energy, once she’d finished chasing the last bit of soup round the bowl with a hunk of bread. ‘Do you feel any ideas of your own are forming yet, now you’ve seen the lay of the land, as it were?’ she asked hopefully.

‘I do, actually,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about it while I ate my sandwich.’

‘There, I knew your clever, artistic mind would come up with something!’

We went through to the library where Mercy opened a drawer in a mahogany desk and pulled out a large manila envelope.

‘These are the original plans Randal had drawn up. He emailed me copies to Malawi.’

She spread the papers and plans out on the desk top and I studied them. They were much as she’d already described, but with more detail.

‘Hmm … I think he was right about opening the mill to the public and his idea of a café on the mezzanine floor is inspired,’ I said.

‘I don’t see why anyone would come to an old mill,’ Mercy objected.

‘But in the last few years lots of old mills have opened as tourist attractions, usually with craft workshops and that kind of thing,’ I told her. ‘People will go anywhere for a day out, especially if there’s a café.’

‘So, you consider his ideas have some merit?’

‘Definitely, though I think he’d be missing a trick by replacing the cracker factory with more craft units or shops, because it could be the central attraction. Visitors would love to watch them being made and then have the opportunity to buy them right afterwards.’

‘But surely crackers are just a Christmas thing and visitors would be seasonal?’

‘Not at all – they’d come all the year round, especially if there was one of those Christmas shops too, selling not only the crackers but everything from baubles to fake trees.’

‘Well, I never!’ she said. ‘Christmas all year!’

‘The cracker factory hardly takes up half the mill floor, leaving plenty of room for a Christmas shop. And the customers could see down into the workshop from the café, if it’s on the mezzanine.’

I sketched out a rough plan on a piece of notepaper. ‘See – the visitors come through the front door into the lobby, where they can pick up a free leaflet giving them information about the attractions on offer. You might have to upgrade the loos there; I don’t know what they’re like,’ I added. ‘You’ll certainly need a disabled one somewhere and a ramp up to the front door.’

Mercy nodded, jotting it down. She’d pulled out a reporter’s notebook and appeared to have started a list.

‘While we’re on the subject of access, a small lift could be fitted to take customers up to the café, too – climbing all those stairs isn’t going to be for everybody.’

‘Very true, dear,’ she said, making another note. ‘Carry on.’

‘They enter the main floor of the mill down a central walkway, with the Christmas shop to the right, and the cracker factory to the left, which will be divided off by some kind of partition, either waist-high or with viewing windows, to keep the visitors from getting underfoot.’

‘Good thinking. Health and Safety would probably have something to say about that.’

‘Health and Safety are likely to have a lot to say on all kinds of things,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they walk down past the cracker making, and then enter the middle of the storeroom through doors at the back.’

I drew a quick sketch. ‘See, the first storeroom’s door can be blocked off, so it’s only accessible from the cracker workshop. Then I suggest you turn the other two into a museum dedicated to the history of Marwood’s Magical Crackers, including the Quaker connection and any bits of interesting family history.’