First, a farming update. I must say at the moment things at home on the farm are being neglected. Fortunately I have a young farming neighbour, Gwyndaf, who helps out and anyway at the moment things are fairly quiet. We did manage to repair a section of stonewall that had come down on our boundary last week which was a pleasant change from Baavet.. ing. The weather has been incredibly mild and pleasant. As I reported in a previous blog the grass is still growing however we have heard things aren’t so good elsewhere, especially parts of England where due to very dry weather in the spring and a cold summer grass was in short supply throughout, and supplement feeding of stock has started early. 

We moved some sheep around today. Now moving sheep can either be a nightmare or they just behave themselves and its effortless (this is rarely the case.)

We moved some sheep from a large 10 acre field full of gorse bushes where they have a habit of hiding from the dog or going round in circles. So we mounted a 2 prong attack with Lesley going one way while Moss and I went the other. I arrived at the essential gate without seeing one sheep only to find Lesley sporting a broad grin.

“Have you seen them?” I asked

 “I’ve moved them all,” she said, “they were already by the gate so I just whistled and they thought I had the dog with me and off they trotted, straight in”

If only sheep moving was always that simple.

This is David who collects your Baavets.  The large white sack to his right contains the special wool for your pillows.

Now we know where every little Baavet has gone except one. Yes you are all marked people… but only for the best possible reasons… we like you!  You are all Baaveteers and we even know what Baavets you have… but this isn’t big brother watching you. No it’s not cyber spying either it’s just Lesley religiously recording on good old fashioned paper, because you matter! Ahh, isn’t that nice. She will often recognise a name when the orders come in (that’s you who keep ordering more, thank you by the way) and believe me, without you we wouldn’t keep going, especially when the going gets rough.

 

Not long ago we had a nice lady email us wanting one of our factory seconds, she wanted to know a little more about them. Lesley gave her more details and she went ahead and ordered. The Baavet was dispatched as usual, with our usual courier, David. It’s a National Courier company that we deal with but it’s a local guy running his own area that does all of our collections and sets them on their way. 

Several days went by and I went into the office one morning and there was an email from the lady, we will call her Ms X (how very original)

It was a very blunt email really;

Dear Baavet,

I have received my Baavet, I was expecting a factory second I wasn’t expecting a second hand duvet complete with nasty stains and black hairs…’ 

I didn’t know what to think or say in reply to the email from Ms X but by then Lesley had arrived.

She was as shocked, as I was and we both couldn’t believe it. The only way to get to the bottom of the problem was to get the duvet back (notice I didn’t call it a Baavet)

Lesley emailed the lady immediately, refunded her payment and apologised saying we had no idea what had gone wrong could she please post the offending duvet back before we could make any real comment.

Several more days went by then the package arrived on the Friday but we were very busy running adventure activities that weekend so it wasn’t opened until Sunday. I was out and forgot about it. When I came back the opened box was in the garden with a duvet sticking out of the top.

For a moment I forgot about the Baavet return and thought it was something else. I walked over and pulled it out.

 I dropped it almost immediately it was the worst stained, dirty duvet, I had ever seen and to add insult to injury it was……a polyester duvet!... Argh!....  It was disgusting.

“What on earth’s this?” I shouted to Lesley in the house.

I thought for a split second, then realised what must have happened.  Someone had stolen our Baavet and switched it for their old dirty duvet complete with black hairs.  No!... Yes!.... No kidding. 

It was a Baavet Heist!

At first we were relieved it wasn’t a Baavet that had so offended Ms X. Then, we were bloody angry that someone had stolen a Baavet.

And then quite slowly I began to see the funny side to the story and even to be flattered.

Someone hadn’t just stolen our Baavet and had gone to some great length to do it.

Well we were much relieved to email Ms X and tell her what we had found. She was also relieved because she didn’t really believe that we were that sort of company.

We offered her a free Baavet as compensation but she refused to accept one and insisted on paying, which was really nice of her.

Now either Ms X was extremely crafty about getting an extra duvet or someone must have gone to some great length to smuggle their own dirty duvet into a warehouse somewhere; taken the Baavet out of the box; replaced it with their grotty one; packaged it up again and sent it on its way; and then smuggled the Baavet out of a warehouse. That takes some real effort.

(We were assuming that this had been done in transit it could hardly have been done on Ms X’s front porch.)

A real effort, a real heist! ‘How valuable does that make a Baavet?’ we thought.

So did we ever get to the bottom of the matter? Well no, not really, the couriers looked into the matter but with hundreds of thousands of items going through so many depots and hands it was almost impossible to pin down a possible culprit. However we did realise that our boxes, which as you know are just plane brown cardboard ones with just our sheep logo which says ‘natural wool duvet’ (we don’t use coloured expensive boxes that are just thrown away and have to then be cleaned of ink for recycling) are going through the same depots time and time again so people see them and must begin to recognise them. What they wouldn’t know was what is inside the box whether a single, double or king size, well that was the case until a few days before the incident when I began to put a sticker on saying single, double etc and that was when the culprit decided to strike and get the right sized Baavet!

We stopped doing that immediately and we haven’t had any bother since.

Moss on guard with your Baavet orders… just in case. 

If you are out there, you Baavet thief, you should be ashamed of yourself. I'd wish sleepless nights on you but I know that's now impossible.

And there we have it, a Baavet must be really valuable, well we think so, and so does at least one other person who went to so much trouble to get one through a cunning heist!