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Where do you start when you’ve an idea.  For me it started with the question around doing something I’m passionate about.  It’s the modern thinking that we have the luxury to explore in the western world to look at what we’re doing and ask “Am I happy?”  Even if the answer is obvious the fix isn’t.  My passion started when I was a young girl and like many sat on the bed while my mum got ready to go out for the evening.  Her attitude, her sense of style, the smell of her perfume and the orange of her lips that I couldn’t taste as she left the house.  I use to sleep walk and quite often my mum would wake up to find me in her closet.  I didn’t really think about those stories but maybe it really was a sign.  I have  been thinking about this for about 10 years so day is the first of action.

When I was 14 I found an old trench coat in our house that had belonged to my grandfather.  It was cool, it had fab lining and most of all it had a story, a legacy of a man I’d never meet yet to whom I was connected.  That coat was my first experience of wearing an item of clothing that was old, I didn’t even wear hand me downs from my sister as we had different body shapes and not similar fashion taste.  When I was 16 I handed the coat in at a disco, got my ticket and danced the night away.  When I when to retrieve the coat it wasn’t there.  “What do you mean you can’t find the coat?”  Someone had claimed the coat as their own and it was gone.  I was devastated.  I went back the next day to complain to the manager and demand a search of the club.  All to no avail.  I managed to get 4o pounds sterling as compensation but no amount of money would compensate my loss.  From there my devotion to secondhand stores started.  The crusade of trying to find the coat.  I thought it might turn up in one of these stores.  During that search I’d go through the rails and I’d find other things, cute dresses, coats (man a lot of coats, but never the one) and many other weird and wonderful things.  So when I asked myself “what makes me happy?” the answer was simple, when I’m sruntin’.