County Road
There's a stretch of County Road in Liverpool that's been everything to me. Home. Hope. Heartbreak. The kind of place that teaches you more about yourself in five years than most people learn in a lifetime.
Second To None. That's what I called the shop. Not because I was being cocky. Because I meant it. Every item on that shelf was hand-picked. Every price was fair. Every customer who walked in was treated like they mattered, because they did. I was giving them something decent and they were giving me a reason to keep going.
I borrowed twenty thousand pounds to open it. That's not a small number when you're a bus driver. That's not a number you just throw at a dream and hope it sticks. That's savings. Loans. Favour after favour. Denise didn't flinch. Neither did I. We believed in it.
The plan was simple. Work five days a week managing Chester Private Shop. Drive down on my days off. Stock the shelves. Serve customers. Build something that Denise could run during the week, give my mum something to do, get Cameron involved. Get the family working together. Get out of the house. Make something that was ours.
And for a while, it worked. People came in. They bought things. They came back. They brought their mates. County Road is like that — word spreads fast when something's decent.
The shop was doing well. Not making me rich, but covering its costs. Paying its way. That's all I ever wanted from it. I didn't need an empire. I needed a living. A proper living for my family. Something that didn't depend on a shift roster and a depot clocking-in machine.
Then April 2012 happened.
I got the call at work. Chester. Middle of a shift. Someone had smashed the front window. Taken everything. Stock. Cash. The lot. The shelves were bare. The door was hanging off. Six months of graft wiped out in one night by some nameless coward who probably got fifty quid for the lot down the pub.
You don't sleep after something like that. You lie there going through what you could have done differently. Better locks. An alarm. Insurance that actually pays out instead of finding a clause that says "not covered for acts of bastardry." But the truth is, you can't prepare for someone deciding your dream is worth less than their next fix.
We closed in July 2012. Three months of trying to make it work with nothing. Three months of going in every day to an empty shop, pretending this was still a thing. It wasn't. I knew it. Denise knew it. The regulars knew it. But you keep going because stopping feels like letting them win.
Then you stop anyway. Because you've got no choice.
Six and a half years I paid that twenty grand back. Every month. Like clockwork. While driving buses. While raising kids. While pretending it didn't hurt. Because what's the alternative? You complain? You give up? You let some scrote who probably doesn't even remember what they did take your future as well as your stock?
No. You pay it back. Every penny. And then you start again.
County Road is still there. The shop isn't. But the lesson is. Everything I've built since — the website, the app, the book, all of it — comes from that place. Not the building. The principle. You don't stop. You can lose everything and you still don't stop.
Because stopping is the only thing that actually defeats you. Everything else is just a setback.