Hello all!
Landlord Harry here! This is my first blog, ever. So apologies if its a bit pants!
When COVID Came
Picture the scene. Most businesses during the COVID pandemic were forced to shut, meaning they could not take any income to pay their bills – and we were no exception. It was a stressful time and I remember being in the pub watching the TV, with staff and locals, when the news hit. We and many others were forced to close the pub to stop the risk of infection of COVID. It was a very emotional time.
Now, don't quote me, but if i remember rightly, during the lock down, the PCA (pubs code adjudicator) reported approximately 3,500 pubs closed with closures of up to 30 pubs per day at one point, with a further 384 pubs that were either demolished or repurposed This equated to 6 pubs disappearing a week . As a landlord of a pub, this news sent shivers down my spine and I knew right there and then my brother and I had to formulate a plan to try bring in some income.
Plan B
First, we tried take-away. if you go to our Instagram site and look at our pictures, you'll see the menu we came up with. We posted like crazy and began offering take-aways to the public. First problem with this was our kitchen was not set up for doing takeaway. Second problem was that we did deliveries but had no experience in it, and I must say now a big shout out to all delivery drivers who deliver in the dark! Its a challenge for sure, but also..to do deliveries as a business, you must have a business insurance on your car that allows this. Now I didn't know this when we started, it was only when I was pulled over by the police in Sandown (the policeman then educated me on what insurance I would need and said he'd let us off this time as publicans seem to be struggling quite a bit... which I thought was nice of him!) this was during the drive over to Sandown to re-deliver the Lasagne (we forgot to put in the customers bag when they picked it up...face palm moment) which brings us to our third problem with the take away... although we knew the food was good, but the execution of doing the take away wasn't the best, we were still learning and we just weren't busy enough.
And Then Plan C... The Hair
Just a bit of context about my hair, if you known me most my life you can skip this part, but I started growing my hair on the eve of my 9th birthday. For my teens, my 20s and half my 30s, I had long bright ginger straight hair. I was known for it in my local towns on the East coast and it was how people recognised me. It was my identity and more importantly for me, was my safety blanket from the rest of the world. I could hide behind it, use it to destress as well as using it to pull off the baddest windmill at my local rock club, i loved it! In a nutshell, I was proud of my hair and at this point had never thought about cutting it off.
I'm writing this four and a half years on from the time it happened, so I'm bit hazy on how the idea came, about cutting off my hair, but knowing my brother it was probably him that suggested it with his cheeky smile knowing full well it would be him chopping off the pony tail! So... we arranged it. We did a video for our social media ( Mike Weston did this for us free of charge) which can be found on our Facebook, and then created a "go fund me" page for anyone that wished to give donations. The idea was, post video, get some promotion on it, get some donations, cut hair, cry and pay the bills...and it worked! We then set the date, once we knew the government was going to allow us to open, and made a day of it. Locals, friends and family all turned up on the 2nd August 2020 to watch me have my hair cut in extremely windy circumstances by a good friend of mine Lawrence Welling, who did a extremely professional job given the situation and weather.
When all said and done, we had raised £3.6k plus another £500 in cash donations on the day of the hair cut, which helped us get back on track with our rent payments. So I guess you could say it was worth the haircut.
If you were one of the lovely people who donated, then from the bottom my heart thank you so much for the support and its because of you that we are still here trading today.
kindest regards
Harry Fletcher
Owner of the Woodmans Arms
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