Chapter 46
Tilly had pretended not to think about the handsome man who worked next door and how she’d nigh-on thrown herself at him.
Instead, she’d got on with her new business.
Said business had a name, a product, an Instagram account, lots of really good images, but no website and that needed to change.
As she’d got down to the nuts and bolts of creating a website for Foghorn, what had surprised her was that building a cookie-cutter website from the ground up hadn’t taken her very long at all.
She’d followed her nose with the principle of making everything as simple as possible, and it had served her well as she’d dabbled in software, website building and the ins and outs of writing one’s own code.
Mr Google had assured her that these days anyone could build a website in under an hour.
It had taken a lot longer than that, but overall it hadn’t been too painful, and Tilly had nailed it.
She’d chosen a theme, hated it, chosen another, made a logo and added her terms of business.
She’d discovered what a favicon was, registered for payment thingies, learnt about postal zones and couriers.
A VAT question had sent her down a rabbit hole she’d not emerged from for a long time, but all in all, it had been a whole lot easier than servicing a long row of first-class rooms and beds.
She’d learnt lots, including that variants were used when one duvet cover came in three sizes and that there was a word for everything.
By the end of it, Tilly felt as if she’d actually achieved something as she’d squinted at her laptop screen and saw Foghorn looking back at her. Way to go, Tils, way to go.
The thing that hadn’t been quite as easy was telling the story regarding the notion of Foghorn that lived in her head, but she’d given it a good try.
Foghorn began in a back room of a linen mill in the hills of Portugal, where the most beautiful cloth in the house was hidden away because of its flaws.
A slub here, a wander in the weave there, a dye a half-shade too deep.
I stood in that room and couldn't understand it, because the flawed pieces were lovely.
A slub is where you can see the making. A stumble in the weave is the loom's signature.
Years later, after making up thousands of perfect white beds in hotels around the world and never once wanting to climb into any of them, I found myself in an old boat shed on a foggy little island off the south coast of England, and I knew exactly what to do.
Foghorn is that back room, brought home.
Heavy, honest linen in deep colours, made to be washed a hundred times and kept for years, softer with every single one.
At Foghorn, every piece has a story. Some of them show.
The About page had taken the longest. She'd tried to be truthful and, reading it back for the umpteenth time, she supposed she had been.
There was one line she'd taken out and put back in about six times, and in the end, it had stayed.
A bed wasn't meant to look like nobody had ever slept in it.
Four years of hospital corners said otherwise, but there you go. Foghorn was not a hotel.
Clicking through the whole site from top to bottom one last time, Tilly noted that it wasn’t going to change the world, but for a first attempt it wasn’t bad.
It all worked quite well, and the pictures looked, if she said so herself, rather lovely.
There was really only one thing left to do, and that was to go live.
The shop sat behind its password, tucked up safe where nobody could see, judge it, or, more to the point, not buy anything from it.
All Tilly had to do was press one button, and Foghorn would be out there in the world, open for business, hers, but she kept chickening out.
Honestly. What was she like? She'd crossed the planet on her own, walked out of a marriage, faced down a Darling storm and lugged a shed's worth of nets down a jetty, and here she was too nervous to launch Foghorn’s website.
Worst they can do is laugh, Tils. Trying to keep her dad’s words in mind, Tilly decided to wait a few more days. Give Foghorn a little bit of time to settle in.