FROME gift shop owner, Sarah Lloyd Williams, found a way of making local people happy while her shop was closed during lockdown.
Mark Captain reports, “At first, Sarah relished the opportunity to spend every day with her dog, Chester, taking him with other dogs out for walks. However, by nature, she is a hands-on person and soon realised she needed to find something to fill her time other than dog walking and cleaning.
“She had found out that someone local to her had been having a hard time. “
Sarah said, “I knew this lady slightly and wondered if there was anything I could do to help. I didn’t feel that I knew her enough to contact her offering assistance, so instead I decided to leave a little gift on her doorstep.”
She called it a Happy Bag, containing a copy of The Happy Newspaper (a quarterly newspaper by Emily Coxhead containing nothing but good news), a chocolate bar, bath bomb and a little note.
The good deed went down so well that the recipient messaged Sarah to ask if she could buy a Happy Bag for her friend. “I didn’t want any money,” Sarah explained, “this was something small that I could do with items that I already sell in Figgins, so I delivered a Happy Bag to her friend and it went from there.”
Mark Captain continued, “She ended up delivering a number of bags in the local area and it led to doing a few other little things for people, such as picking up medicines, shopping and more dog walking.
“For Sarah, this became a lovely way to connect with people that she barely knew, or had never met before, and it made lockdown much easier to navigate: “Giving away some Happy Bags certainly made me feel much happier. It’s a tiny thing, but sometimes that’s all it takes to make someone’s day,” she says.
Figgins has now reopened, with Sarah taking steps to make sure her shop is safer with a screen, hand sanitising stations, floor stickers and limiting the number of people in the shop at any one time. She is also donating a Happy Bag every week to someone in the local community.”
Pictured: Sarah outside Figgins by Mark Captain.
