Heeelp!

Frenetic Sunday starting at 6 am feeding the cats, tableting those that need it and washing up a mountain of cat dishes.

Then to the bookshop at nine to load Nicola's car with boxes of books for our sale at ASDA. Unload, wave goodbye to Pat and Amy who stay to begin setting up, then return to shop and repeat the process.

Grab bike, off to Burleigh st to open up our shop there and let in Glenn with the large dog collecting box from the stall at Arbury Carnival.

On arrival, discover Saturday team evidently had several gigantic donations of sale items (good) but hadn't had time to do any processing (less good as stock room now so full I can't move).

Decide nothing I can do about this for the present and open up. 

Feed coffee to the wonderful volunteer who takes over the till and stagger back to do battle with the horror. 

Inspection of the bags fortunately reveals several of them contain things that can be processed while at the till; mostly this involves attaching gift aid stickers and a price and is easily done with small items such as DVDs and videos.

We recently put out an appeal for soft toys, and our supporters have done us proud; lots of these, and again quickly sorted and priced. Legally we can only sell soft toys if they have the "CE" kite mark which should mean they are safe for children.

In a couple of hours we must have put out at least 200 individual items between us. This is key to a successful shop as customers will only keep coming back if they see new stock coming out each day.

By 5 pm we are about ready to drop, but the level in the stock room has dropped enough for the remaining unsorted bags to be stacked fairly neatly in our sorting bins ready for the Monday team to start hanging and steaming clothes to fill the shop rails which have been depleted by shoppers during the day.

Cash up and reconcile the till and find we've taken £188.40; reasonably good for a Sunday. 

Unfortunately this means Pat and Nicola have to be left to pack up and transport the unsold book sale remains on their own, which is heavy work as only a proportion of books will go at any sale.

We need more help (or I need to be twins!)

Update on Taylor

Taylor's swollen pads are better than they were, but still not normal, so I took him in for an appointment with the veterinary dermatologist this morning. He's now on a different antibiotic with slightly lower levels of the steroids for another five weeks and booked for re-exam. then.

As I'd booked the whole day as leave from work, I thought I might as well open up the bookshop for the rest of the afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to take £25 in only two hours. It just goes to show the shop can be a useful asset to generate funds if we can only recruit enough volunteers to open every day. 

If you're interested in old books, the shop is a fun place to be as there's always something unexpected turning up—and you do get to read books if you want! If you're looking for something that will help improve your CV, this may be for you, and we do give references for job interviews if we're asked.

If you might be interested in volunteering, please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk