7. The MAGIC beans . . .

In a local card shop I saw a series of cards by Sandra Boynton, little hippos and ducks and stuff. “I could do that” I said and proceeded to create a series of humorous  greetings cards with little witty sayings like ‘It’s your Birthday … SCREW YOU!’ That was the easy bit! Next came the selling and walking from publisher to publisher trying to convince them to buy these works of art.

Nobody wanted to take them on, they were so different to the gaudy humorous cards they were used to.
I don’t know how much desperation was involved but I kept on trying and pushing those cards until I met a T-shirt salesman from London, he had that glint in his eye and told me he would make me rich and famous, it was almost like being offered a handful of magic beans for a cow! He may have been a lot of wind but we soon had over a hundred designs on the market and a growing company. Although we tried hard to make it work, I guess we didn’t try hard enough. The business was soon struggling and I had to bring home the bacon, One day after an unusually big argument I walked out and took on a job in a print studio for a weekly wage. So with security to buy another modest little home in East Grinstead near London, I started again. But it was all too unexciting, I needed another cunning plan . . .

Continued . . .