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Well if you are looking at our website today you must be looking for a way out of the daily grind you find yourself in – am I right?

If that is true and believe us we know how that feels we can show you a way out. But before we start we want to give you an insight to who we are and why we are doing what we do today.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good then I will begin.

Carol and Barry

Carol

Once upon a time ##..# Years ago I worked in Saudi Arabia as a Nursery Teacher teaching international children from 1 year to six years old in the English compound we had children from families who were employed in the oil, military, engineers and wealthy Saudi families.

I enjoyed my work. School started early and finished midday as at midday it just got too hot to work. Once the school was over I did not have far to go home, as my home was in the compound, I did what had to be done around the house then sat at the poolside with the rest of the women for a few hours. Some days we went in into town the only drawback about that was we could not go alone we had to have a driver take us. Night life in Saudi, we stayed in the compound but we would get invited to some sort of evening extravaganza on one occasion we were invited to the British Ambassadors’ Ball all very nice but after a time it starts to be too much. I worked in Saudi for two years then I moved to Australia.

What can I say about Australia for a start like Saudi it was big and hot Saudi has sand as far as the eye could see Australia has The Outback rough terrain as far as you can see it could take us two days to go from one town to the next! I worked as a Nursery Teacher in Perth teaching the same age group as I did in Saudi. If you like wildlife you will not be disappointed in Australia. We had wildlife which I would not like to see again, we had poisonous snakes in the garage which you had to call someone out to take it away (on more that one occasion) in the end I would send someone in first before I would go in. Spiders man oh man! I have seen spiders the twice the size of your hand and they get every where! You have to keep the plugs in the sinks and toilet lids down and I always, always flushed the toilet first before I lifted the lid. I lived in Australia for two years and I made some good friends.

In the end I came back to the UK and the English weather. What do I miss about working abroad? It has to be the sun, yes on most days it got to hot but with good air conditioning you got by.

Barry

My background is in engineering I have worked in engineering from the start. I started out as a trainee store keeper doing the usual keeping the place clean and tidy and issuing goods and unloading vans. After six years I was made redundant .I remember that time well because my father died in June of that year and I was made redundant three months later .I was living at home and I was 23 at the time it was the 70’s and thing on the job front were bad as I was the oldest of three I ended up selling my car to keep things going, we had a mortgage to pay as well as the rest of the bills

I was not unemployed for long I got a job in another engineering factory doing more or less the same after a year at Christmas time I was made redundant again. I was in and out of jobs like a Jack in the Box and each time I was made redundant. Then I found out that the first place which I had worked at was looking for someone to take over the control of the management of the stores as the other guy was retiring. So I put in for the job and got it. I worked there for 30 years then one year just before Christmas I was made redundant. This was just great I had just got married in July of that year and now six months latter I was out of a job. I was gutted not the best way to start married life that was in the late 90’s. I have been made redundant seven times things had to change and fast.

I decided to open a Country Store in my local village after working things about in my head I could see that this could work. We were on the main rout to Scotland and The Lake District and traffic had to go past the shop to go to Scotland and The Lakes. We started out small we did not have that much stock and at that time (the banks did not want to know us so we could not get a bank loan) we put what we could afford to buy on the shelves and some company’s believed in us to give us 30days credit. I remember on woman came in to the shop on the first day we opened she was on her way to Scotland and asked ‘are we closing down’ I told you that we did not have much on the shelves on that first day.

We built the shop up and we sold fishing tackle and bait, horse feed and pet feeds from fish food to dog food a full range of equestrian products. The shop was growing so we moved to a bigger shop in the village and we expanded our range of fishing tackle and equestrian goods.

We were making a good profit and we were working seven days a week we were closed on Sundays but we still had to go in to check on the fishing bait and fax orders off after close on Saturday night. Good money but no time to spend and enjoy it. In the end we said enough was enough and we wanted to have more time and work from home.