Last year in April, Cape Town experienced terrible fires, one of which destroyed vital documents in University of Cape Town's Jagger Reading Room. I was reminded of this recently when I was looking for a book in UCT's library system. The result came back 'lost in fire'. What a loss.

That night my colleague went to our Newlands shop and took all of the stock home, in case the fire spread to Montebello. Luckily we were spared. The smoke, however, had effects that we didn't expect. At Beloved, the chains on a number of items on display at the Waterfront became oxidised. We removed these items from display and put them into our sale box.