Christmas Eve 2010.
The times, they are a-changing. By Kate
Christmas eve. I have retreated to the back of the bar because I have enough hotel work to last me till Christmas 2012 and so need to remove myself from the fray. We have just opened a bottle of Larmandier-Bernier Blanc de Blancs for the team. It isn’t the Gautherot Blanc de Argile but then times are hard. This is still completely delicious though and, relatively speaking, good value.
Lucy, our resident student make up artist, has given all the Green & Blue ladies sparkly eyes thanks to some impressively bling glitter eyeshadow . Rebecca’s hair is an even more festive shade of red and I am wearing my father Christmas brooch. Not much of a concession but it has been a long, hard month.
From next year, Jude and I will continue to run Green & Blue together but we will no longer be together in any other sense. This blog is not the place to go into the how and why this came to pass but it is relevant to mention it here as the strain of running this particularly trying business has undoubtedly played some part in this.
It is quite extraordinary how one small wine shop and bar in South East London can have proved to be such a monster. In some ways, I feel as though for 5 years, everything that I am and have has been chewed and swallowed up by this beast that still simply refuses to either be tamed or satisfied. Not for the first time, I am frequently wondering how it is that I still have not run, screaming, as far away as I can afford to go.
Perhaps because, based on current financial conditions, this would probably be Margate
I suppose I am still here because I still believe in it. I still believe that as many people as possible should have access to the best wines of the world :- those produced in ways that do not harm the environment or the drinkers. Life is hard and we all need good, healthy ways to celebrate it when ever we can and Green & Blue can provide the best possible tools for those celebrations.
I also believe, still, in the power of a business to be about community as well as profit. That remains a work in progress and is, I am beginning to finally understand, a much longer process than I could have possibly imagined 5 years ago. For a naturally very impatient person, this has been a torturous lesson and one I am still having to learn.
I would be ungrateful in the extreme if I felt too sorry for myself at this point though. When I look at the team we have built up here; how hard they work and how much they care and how they intrinsically get what we do; I can’t possible just collapse in a heap of self pity in a corner.
And this morning already a steady stream of some of our best and most loyal customers have been in for their special Christmas wines. Again, a group of people who completely get what we are about and, more importantly, seem to love this business as much as we do.
Sometimes I wonder if the dark forces of commerce or perhaps just the mysterious rhythms of fate are determined to test me to the nth degree – take away absolutely everything that I have put all my energy into for what feels like forever. I really hope that doesn’t happen (and at the moment I have no reason to believe that it will) but even then, it is very clear to me that if it all went, I would always know that, for all the deep and dark nightmares we have endured, nothing can ever take away the fact of the above.
And so for that, my most sincere and heartfelt thank you to everyone who buys wine from us either in our shop or on-line, watches our clips and reads our blog, eats and drinks in our bar, comes to our tastings and does our courses and who has such great enthusiasm for all of the above .
Thank you also more than I can ever say to all of our beloved team :- Tom, Tony, Rebecca, Emily, Liz, Simon, Holly, Linda, Wayne, Oscar, Lucy, Jane, Rosie, Danielle and Rachel.
And finally, my biggest thanks to Jude. For sticking with Green & Blue through such amazingly bad times and for wanting to stick with it still, at least for a while until he starts up his painting and silverwork more seriously again.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Christmas eve. I have retreated to the back of the bar because I have enough hotel work to last me till Christmas 2012 and so need to remove myself from the fray. We have just opened a bottle of Larmandier-Bernier Blanc de Blancs for the team. It isn’t the Gautherot Blanc de Argile but then times are hard. This is still completely delicious though and, relatively speaking, good value.
