Epig and MoonBay

Once upon a time there was no such thing as the Internet so people went to shops, markets and jumble sales to buy and sell tat. When I say "tat" I don't mean real rubbish I just mean tat, bits and pieces of all sorts of tatty stuff. It was OK but you could get soaked the rain, miss the bus home or trip over a kerb or loose flagstone. Going out was risky. Now we can all stay at home and twiddle about on some device and gain or reduce all the tat we ever needed to adjust. You can however easy disturb the fine balance of your tiny mind in the process.

So this week I've been busy decluttering via Ebay, selling tat. It's both rewarding and frustrating. Oh and it's also a bit addictive and time consuming. You can lurk a lot if you're not careful. Watching the bids come in, then I watch then fade away again, wasting time. Queries are common; will you ship to Portugal or Bosnia? What are the precise dimensions? Would you consider bundling together two items and splitting the shipping costs? Things I just hadn't though about before writing the advert. Now I know. The key thing is estimating the posting and packing charge, profit is quickly eaten up when you get that wrong, anything over 2kg costs a bloody fortune via Royal Mail. I'm a wiser man this week, next week my fortune will be made. Lightweight tat for heavy duty customers.

I also decided to buy a job lot of birthday cards from Moonpig, the self design uploading kind. It's actually a good enough site but fiddly. The adjustments are clunky and the options are quite limited but I persevered. No visit to Moonpig is complete however without that moment when you lose your wonderful piece of artwork, just as you're ready to send it to the basket and start the next, up pops the flowers and chocs and champagne option (designed for the truly desperate). At this point any wayward click of the mouse or stray hand wobble sends your newly created masterpiece into oblivion...and you start again...and again. But it's still a good service, in your letter box in 48 hours and almost the design you expected, well a bit more blurry perhaps. Tomorrow, it's those live videos from the cab of a Norwegian railway train. Yahoo! Just learn to live with the disappointment.