Internet stopped working at 3 p.m.
Till total £550.34
52 customers
WEDNESDAY, 6 AUGUST
Online orders: 0
Books found: 0
When I came downstairs in the morning to open the shop there was still no internet connection, so I telephoned Titan Telecom, my new supplier, who told me that I would need a new username and password. When I explained that this was a matter of urgency, as we had no orders coming through, they said that a technician would call back soon, so I left Laurie and Katie with instructions to sort it out.
It rained heavily last night, and the morning was cloudy, but it turned into a glorious day in spite of the forecast. Just as well, as it was Wigtown Show day. I spent most of the day filming sheep, cows, horses and chickens and chatting to farmers. Wigtown Show is one of the oldest agricultural shows in Scotland. It has been held annually for 200 years, and it entails marquees filled with people selling country craft things and food. There’s music and a bar and all manner of entertainment, as well as the pens full of livestock.
The Titan Telecom technician called at 3.45 p.m., and we were back online by 4 p.m., so the two sets of wages I paid the girls to list books online were, thanks to technical problems, wasted.
Laurie and Katie went to the post-cattle show party in the marquee and stayed overnight in the shop. I went to bed at about 1 a.m. and they still hadn’t come home.
Till total £386.90
43 customers
THURSDAY, 7 AUGUST
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
Laurie was up at about 8.50 a.m., Katie at about 9.15 a.m. Both looked pretty hungover and were relatively useless all day.
Till total £337.05
28 customers
FRIDAY, 8 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
I left for Ballater at 7 a.m., so Laurie opened the shop today. Nicky was at home making things to take to Edinburgh next week to help promote the Random Book Club at their book festival. She is planning to go up on Wednesday and Thursday and hand out flyers and free books, most of which – she has now told me – she just removed from the shelves of the shop without asking me.
I arrived in Ballater just before noon and found the house, a small, unattractive bungalow in a scheme of identical small, unattractive bungalows, all with fussy rose gardens. The man who greeted me at the door was small and bearded, and wearing a dressing gown and slippers. His wife was identically attired. The house was small and cluttered, and a layer of dust and grime appeared to cover every surface. The books were in several rooms throughout the house, many of them upstairs in a converted attic with a very narrow staircase leading up to it. The wife made me a cup of tea, and I worked my way through the collection while they watched television. They were friendly enough but didn’t appear to want to chat. The books were slightly disappointing – Nansen’s Farthest North in a two-volume leather-bound edition in poor condition, the Penguin edition of Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World and Admiral Evans’s South with Scott – and most of the collection was in average to poor condition. There were none of the big hitters you always hope for in a polar collection – Shackleton’s South in the first edition, or The Heart of the Antarctic in the de luxe edition, which is probably just as well as money is tight this year. After an hour or so I had amassed about six boxes of books, all about the Antarctic, and we agreed a price of £300. Both the man and his wife had been fairly uncommunicative but not unfriendly, and I had early on decided that he probably had little to say for himself, but as I was loading the boxes into the van I asked what had piqued his interest in Antarctica, at which point he became surprisingly animated. He had been part of the British Antarctic Survey in his thirties and had been there for several summers doing research. I really ought to be less dismissive of customers and people selling books.
Left Aberdeenshire at just after 1 p.m. and headed south. Home by 6 p.m.
Till total £196.98
19 customers
SATURDAY, 9 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
Nicky was in the shop today, a glorious sunny day. I’m off for a few days’ fishing next week, so we discussed the various jobs that need to be done in my absence. I have little or no confidence that she absorbed any of the information and expect that she will do exactly as she pleases while I am away.
As Nicky was leaving, someone on a mobility scooter almost ran her down on the pavement. Initially I thought it might have been Andy, who bought hers a few weeks ago. As I was musing at the irony of her being run over by her own mobility scooter, she came back into the shop to collect her hat, which she had left in a corner somewhere. I asked her if she had seen Andy lately, as I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. She replied with the casual indifference that is the preserve of those who believe that death is the beginning rather than the end, ‘He died last week.’
Till total £336.87
25 customers
SUNDAY, 10 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Drove up to Lairg for three days’ fishing with friends Frederick and Fenella and the other guests they’d invited. The A9 is a tortuous road, particularly when you are on your own, as there is no radio signal for much of it. Normally, I can re-tune to long wave and listen to Test Match Special, but England beat India with a day to spare yesterday, so I was denied even that to keep me company. It rained heavily all the way, and the forecast is for more of the same all week. Ideally for salmon-fishing a falling river is best, but it looks very much like this is not going to be likely.
This trip is a highlight of my year, and I live in perpetual fear of not being invited again – probably for my inadequate fishing (and social) skills. Frederick’s family shares the fishing rights for the River Shin and the Oykel with a number of other people, and they own a considerably extended cottage just outside Lairg. Every year for the past few years it has been my good fortune to have been invited to fish for a few days on some of the best salmon water in Scotland. By now I know most of the other people who are also invited – it changes every year – and this time, as well as Frederick’s children from his first marriage, Wilf and Daisy, the guests include Biffy, with whom I was at school for a few years, and Will, a charming man whom I hadn’t met before.
The Shin is a spectacular river; Mohamed Al-Fayed built a visitor centre near the Falls of Shin, where there is a platform from which anyone can stand and watch the salmon waiting in the falls pool burst out of the water and power up through the waterfall into the upper section of the river to spawn. The Shin is part of a hydro system, and cuts a deep and steep gorge through a beautiful broad-leafed landscape, dropping dramatically down into the Kyle of Sutherland. There is a sense of something truly ancient about the Shin – perhaps it’s a connection to the Ice Age – huge boulders the size of houses are strewn along its path – or some form of geological transformation that you can’t help but feel a part of, because the river is still carving and ploughing its way along the Silurian fault-line in the Moine Nappe to the sea. The upper waters of the Oykel have a similar appearance, but there the landscape is more open: the Shin is enclosed by high cliffs, trapped in the gorge and, as I discovered one year, at the mercy of the hydro scheme. I was kneeling on a rock in the middle of the river when a hydro technician must have decided to open the sluice. I was concentrating on trying to cover the water with my fly, so that I failed to notice that the rock on which I was kneeling had become submersed. By the time I was aware, the river between the rock and the bank had risen to such a level that the only way I could get back was to flood my waders and stagger, soaked, to the trees and the path home.
MONDAY, 11 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
The sound of howling wind and driving rain woke me at 7 a.m. Frederick and I drove from the cottage down to the Shin to meet up with the ghillies.
The Shin was unfishable at 5 feet, as was the Oykel at 11 feet. Far too much water to fish either, so we went to the falls of both rivers to see what they looked like with so vast a volume of water crashing through them.
Till total £467.46
45 customers
TUESDAY, 12 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Up at 7.30 a.m. with Will, one of the other guests – an old friend of Frederick. We drove to beat 3 on the Oykel, where the water was very high. I caught an 18lb. salmon at about 9 a.m., just as Peter, one of the ghillies, arrived. It turned out to be the only fish caught on the Oykel that day. In the afternoon I fished the Shin and lost a huge salmon above the falls, which took all of the line off my reel in a matter of seconds and kept going, leaving a ‘V’ in its wake. I am convinced that it must have been over 30lb. I doubt whether anyone believed me when I told them.
Till total £534.57
54 customers
WEDNESDAY, 13 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Spent the morning fishing. After lunch I said goodbye and left for Glasgow, where I spent the night in a hotel, and where I have a book deal nearby tomorrow morning.
Till total £297.70
25 customers
THURSDAY, 14 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Awoke at 8 a.m. and drove to a house in Glasgow to meet a young couple who are moving house and have decided to sell their book collection. It included an assortment of mountaineering books, and I picked out three boxes’ worth and offered them £75. As I was writing the cheque on the desk in their office, I accidentally nudged the mouse next to the monitor, which activated the previously dormant screen. It brought up a swingers’ web site on which there was a photograph of a very attractive young dark-haired woman. Thankfully, neither of them was in the room at the time, and when the wife reappeared to take the cheque, the screensaver had returned.
After I had loaded the boxes into the van, I drove home and arrived back at the shop by 12.30 p.m. to find both Laurie and Katie chatting and listening to music instead of working. The counter was a mess, the tables and workspace all littered with books and scraps of paper, so I attempted to give them a lecture about tidiness, to which they responded by calling me a fussy old woman and imitating me, so I checked the river levels online and decided to go to the nearby River Minnoch for the afternoon and try to catch another salmon, an enterprise that proved entirely unsuccessful.
At 4.30 p.m. I returned to the shop to discover my mother giving my cousin Giles a guided tour of the place. She is partial to giving people guided tours of my house. Once, a few years ago, during the book festival, I went to my bedroom to fetch a jumper and found her in there with a very uncomfortable-looking Joan Bakewell, whom she was lecturing on the subject of my tastes in interior design.
An elderly man came in just before 5 p.m. and asked if we could clear books from his late sister’s house near Haugh of Urr (roughly 800 titles). He needs to clear them urgently as he is only here until Saturday, so I have agreed to go over and look at them tomorrow after lunch.
Till total £299.69
32 customers
FRIDAY, 15 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 0
Katie was in today, covering for Nicky.
Monsoon was down again, so we couldn’t access the locator codes to find the books that have been ordered, the title of one of which was He Was Born Gay, by Emlyn Williams.
After lunch I left for Haugh of Urr, a tiny village about thirty-five miles away, to look at a book collection. They were in a very pretty, small whitewashed cottage. The place was a mess, but full of beautiful antique furniture and paintings, and a mixed collection of books. There wasn’t much exceptional material, and a lot of the better books were mouldy and water-damaged from a flood in March, but I found a copy of Don Quixote from 1755 in two volumes and some A. A. Milne firsts. The books, paintings and furniture had come from a stately home, and had been divided among the family when the bigger house was sold. They looked out of place in the tiny cottage and had clearly been bought with a far grander location in mind. The old man was there with his grandson, and said very little. I noticed that I had the same trainers as his grandson, and when I pointed this out to him, he looked horrified. Left with twelve boxes of books and wrote the old man a cheque for £525.
I returned to the shop to find a list of things to do left by Katie before she went home, including ‘Fix Monsoon’. This is becoming far too frequent a problem, and it is probably time to look into an alternative system. It is now inoperable about 25 per cent of the time, and although the tech support is good, they are based in Oregon and so are eight hours behind us. Conveniently, they start work as I am closing up.
Till total £217.98
26 customers
SATURDAY, 16 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 0
On my own in the shop all day, and Monsoon was still down this morning, which means that we can’t even find locator codes for the books that have been ordered overnight. Nicky was at the Edinburgh Book Festival, dispensing Random Book Club flyers and wisdom in equal measure. I received a text message from her at 4 p.m. to say that she had given up and gone to the pub.
By lunchtime I had already had a disagreement with a customer about whether or not ghosts exist, and another who had brought in a carefully bubble-wrapped odd volume of Burns (one from a set of four – the other three were absent) from 1840, believing it to be worth a fortune. She looked quite insulted when I told her that I wouldn’t even take it if she offered it to me for free. Odd volumes are difficult to sell – the chances of finding a buyer who is missing the volume you have, and in a matching binding, are extremely low, so unless it is something exceptional, or an illustrated book with fine woodcuts or copperplate engravings, we – and most book dealers – tend to avoid them.
Helen, the secretary of the Wigtown Agricultural Society, emailed me about the video, which I have yet to start editing.
There was a delivery of two boxes of books this morning. It turned out to be the erotica collection from the widow in Norwich. I had forgotten all about it. I checked their values online and decided to offer her £75 for the lot. It is difficult buying erotica, as very little of it can be sold on Amazon or eBay because they violate the puritanical sensibilities of the prudes in charge of both organisations.
Eliot arrived at 7 p.m. for a board meeting and seemed to be in pretty good form, although his shoes were on the floor in the kitchen within minutes of his arrival.
Till total £407.97
29 customers
MONDAY, 18 AUGUST
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Katie was working in the shop today. She complained about being ill, so I made her a Lemsip. By lunchtime I was starting to feel pretty unwell too.
Monsoon was down until 2 p.m., at which point one of their tech support team in Oregon woke up and finally took over the computer again and fixed it, so that we were able to process the orders and find the books.
In the afternoon a customer asked where we keep the ‘illustrated poetry books’. I explained that we don’t have a specific section and that he would have to trawl through the whole poetry section. He emerged two hours later, looking delighted with a pile of £200 worth of books, explaining that he had just taken up book-collecting and thought that illustrated poetry was an interesting subject on which to build up a collection. I genuinely thought that this type of person had ceased to exist. I could have hugged him.
By the time it came to close up I was feeling pretty rotten – sore throat, headache, runny nose. Callum called by, and we went for a pint.
I still haven’t unloaded the van from the Haugh of Urr deal on Friday, so I really ought to prioritise this and start listing the more valuable books online to recover some cash.
Till total £469.33
TUESDAY, 19 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Katie called in sick, so I was on my own in the shop. I suspect that I have the same malady she has; I felt awful all day, but the Random Book Club mail-out is due tomorrow so I packed all of the books up and processed them on the Royal Mail web site. We are back up to 153 members. The postage was £247.53. When I dropped off the orders this morning, I asked Wilma if she could send the postman over tomorrow to collect the six sacks. William greeted my ‘Hello William, lovely day again’ with his customary ‘What’s lovely about it?’
Till total £270.98
30 customers
WEDNESDAY, 20 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Books found: 2
Both Katie and Laurie called in sick, Laurie at 11 p.m. yesterday, Katie at 8 a.m. today. Tremendously inconsiderate of them both to be ill at the same time.
As I was tidying the shelves in the garden room, I found a copy of The Odyssey in the fishing section. I have yet to question Nicky about this, but the answer will almost certainly be, ‘Aye, but they were on a boat for some of it. What do you think they ate? Aye. Fish. See?’
The postman came and picked up the Random Book Club parcels just after I had locked up, but fortunately I was still in the shop and heard him knocking on the door.
After closing I texted Katie, who has promised that she will cover the shop despite being ill, so that I can drive to Grimsby and collect books from Ian, a bookseller with whom I have had a long working relationship.
Till total £276.70
30 customers
The Diary of a Bookseller Page 16