Tara's Blog

8.5.10

Time is just flying by, Its May and May is the fifth month of the year and that means next month we are half way through our year of fundraising and I have not raised anything near my target - I was starting to get worried that my fundraising attempts were just not good enough. I was gutted when a silk  bridesmaid dress I put on eBay only went for £10 (£120 less than its original price and well short of my expectations). 

Then yesterday fortune struck – I listed a Yew dining table on ebBay that I had bought when we moved house as a stop-gap solution before we could move our actual dining table from the country (the “gap” turned out to be 2 years!). I had bought the table for £100 but I listed it for £1 imagining a bidding frenzy as people raced to grab a bargain.

I received no bids. Not one bid. It felt a little like a rejection of everything I am trying to do for Too Many Women and a reminder that I am maybe not doing enough. (Admittedly I am still sleep deprived and hormonal so it was possibly not quite as bad as all that, but it felt pretty miserable!)

So, just when I was feeling more than disheartened at the prospect of 1. not having raised any money for the cause and 2. having two dining room tables in my already over crowded house for a while longer I received an e-mail from an eBay buyer – her watching alert had not alerted her, she really wanted to buy the table and how much did I want for it…?

Dilema. Obviously I wanted lots and lots of money but I had to be realistic. No one had bid the for the table so could I really ask for more than a pound with good conscience? So I explained the situation, that I had bought the table for £100. I told her about the Too Many Women Campaign and said I’d take whatever amount she wanted to donate. The phone went quiet for a moment and then she said that this was a cause very close to her heart and she’d like to give us the full £100.

I feel like the tables, and my fundraising luck, have turned.  

T x