Confessions of a Bookseller
Page 20
No reply from either builder about the lump of granite that fell from the chimney.
Till Total £325.95
31 Customers
FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Nicky brought in a treat for Foodie Friday. This time it was two chocolate eclairs, but the chocolate had either melted off them or she’d licked it off them on her way in. Either way, I wasn’t going to take any chances.
This morning I discovered – to my horror – that a customer had moved Ken Barlow’s boxes of fishing books into the pile to be listed on FBA, and that Flo hadn’t noticed and listed them and sent them off to Dunfermline before I’d had a chance to discuss a price with him. This is never a good position to find yourself in. If he wants the books back, it’s almost impossible to recover them from Amazon.
This is the third day in a row with just one order. Something’s up with Amazon, Abe or Monsoon.
Nicky has been making a dress for Rebecca Plunkett’s wedding reception tomorrow night. Rebecca is the eldest daughter of Mary and Wilson, friends who live in nearby Newton Stewart. Their middle daughter, Charlotte, worked in the shop one summer. Rebecca’s getting married on the farm where Nicky has her cottage, and Nicky has very kindly offered to have me, Anna, Callum and Sigrid to stay for the night. She’s stitched a pair of curtains together to make her outfit for the wedding – ‘I had to use the ones from the bay window. The others were too small.’
On the way to the post office I bumped into Wigtown resident Stuart McLean, the brains behind The Dark Outside, who reminded me that I still haven’t submitted my piece of audio for this year’s event. I’m one of a handful of people who have produced a piece for it every year. The Dark Outside is Stuart’s brainchild. A few years ago he had the notion to produce something that is the opposite of the infinitely copyable, shareable and distributable world that digital music has become, so he invited people in the music industry to record an entirely new piece of music (or any sort of audio) and send it to him, then destroy the original audio file. Stuart, with the only copies of these recordings, then set up an FM transmitter in the Galloway Hills and broadcast twelve hours of this previously unheard material to anyone with an FM radio who cared to tune in, within a 4-mile radius of the transmitter, before destroying his copies of the files. To quote his website: ‘The Dark Outside FM radio broadcast can only be heard by travelling to the site with a radio, there is no streaming or recording and all files are deleted after being played.’
The place he broadcasts from is the top of a hill with a monument to a man called Alexander Murray, a self-taught shepherd’s son who became Professor of Oriental Languages at Edinburgh University in 1811. The view from Murray’s Monument is glorious, and although it is only a few miles from the rolling, green, fertile landscape of the Machars, the difference is extraordinary. It is surrounded by rough, wild hills – uncultivated and populated by goats and red deer. Waterfalls and thundering burns cut through the granite wilderness. It is like another country, so different is it. It has the grandeur of the Highlands but not the coach-loads of tourists. It is almost unpopulated for hundreds of square miles, and the road below the hill on which the monument sits – the Queen’s Way – is so called because Queen Victoria apparently described it as the most beautiful route in Scotland.
Kevin – my tenant who rents the house in the back garden – asked to borrow a ladder. While he was on the phone, I told him about the chimney problem and he gave me the number of a builder friend of his, so I called him up; he replied straight away and is coming to look at the problem on Monday.
Ken Barlow came in to discuss a price for his fishing books. I told him that I didn’t want many of them but was happy to give him £40 for those I wanted. He asked to see which books I was interested in so that he could take the rest home. When I told him that I couldn’t find them he was pretty annoyed and told me that he’d come in next week. My calculated gamble that he’d just take the money and ask if he could leave the rest failed.
Till Total £270.96
30 Customers
SATURDAY, 22 AUGUST
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
No orders today. Checked Monsoon, and it seems to be working OK.
Telephone call from Ken Barlow. Granny took it and left the following message: ‘Ken Barlow rang. He VERY ANGRY!!!’
Nicky took the day off to work on making her dress for the wedding reception tonight, so Granny and I worked the day between us.
In the evening I drove to Rebecca’s wedding reception. We all drank a lot and danced a lot.
Till Total £214.68
22 Customers
SUNDAY, 23 AUGUST
We awoke in Nicky’s hovel, the sun was streaming in, and the view across Luce Bay was stunning. We all sat outside in front of the house and ate breakfast and drank tea and coffee. It was as idyllic a situation as I can remember in a long time.
MONDAY, 24 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Flo in. Her blackboard for the day consisted of a chalk sketch of a battery with a low power warning, and the words ‘Real books never die’ above it.
Callum and Tracy appeared at 11 a.m. for a cup of tea.
Granny hurt her knee lifting books. She complained that it was swollen, but it looked pretty normal to me. She asked me if the chemist sold mud packs, so I told her that I would get her some mud from the estuary if that was what she wanted. She looked delighted, and said that she hoped that it wouldn’t ‘distoorb’ my day too much.
The builder who I’d called last week telephoned to say that he’d be round at 3 p.m., and – to my amazement – turned up at 3 p.m.
As Flo was putting a book on a shelf, a customer farted in front of her. He looked at her, apologised, then let rip with a second blast and carried on browsing.
Anna invited several friends around for supper and to watch a film, so I set up the projector and we watched Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Tracy stayed over.
Till Total £300.47
24 Customers
TUESDAY, 25 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Flo in at 9 a.m.
The builder came round again at 1 p.m. to say that he and his business partner, Sean, would be around tomorrow morning to make sure that the chimney stack was safe.
Granny spent the day ‘putting in order’ the hardback section before stopping for lunch, during which she managed to spill tea on her laptop, which has now stopped working.
After closing time I telephoned Ken Barlow and told him what had happened with his books being inadvertently being sent to FBA. I offered to replace everything on his list, or give him £150 rather than the £40 I had originally offered. After some negotiation we agreed on the latter solution.
Granny, as a thank-you for me offering to go to the harbour and digging up some mud, bought me a treat from the butcher’s. She told me that it took them a considerable amount of time to work out what she was asking for, and eventually all three of the staff (Stephen, Jack and Nancy) got involved in the discussion until they worked out that a ‘shoshageroll’ was in fact, a sausage roll.
Till Total £276.48
19 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Flo in. Blackboard for the day was a quotation from As You Like It, accompanied by a fairly competent chalk sketch of Shakespeare saying, ‘I like this place and willingly could waste time in it.’
John and Sean, the builders, appeared at 9.10 a.m. with the scaffolder to have a look at the chimney. Sean clambered out of my bedroom window and up the roof and made sure that nothing else was likely to fall off. Thankfully, it wasn’t. After they’d gone, a young man with a splendid quiff came in with three Ian Fleming firsts, including a Dr No without a jacket. Gave him £150.
This afternoon I drove to Newton Stewart to t
he opticians, only to be told that my appointment is tomorrow. Irrefutable evidence that I need new glasses. I took Granny with me – since I hadn’t got round to digging up clay from the estuary yet, she was looking for some sort of poultice to put on her knee to relieve the swelling. She went to both chemists and several other unlikely places and, unsurprisingly, failed to find it. Apparently ‘it normal in Italy’.
After I’d dropped her back at the shop, I went to the river and caught a 6lb. salmon, which I returned. (This has become the norm – when I was young, we kept almost everything we caught, except the fish at the end of the season, whose condition had deteriorated.) The river, on a warm day at this time of year, is the most relaxing place, with no sounds other than the breeze on the leaves of the trees, the gentle lapping of the water and the birdsong. It’s the perfect antidote to everything. The autumnal colours are still a way off, but hints of them are starting to appear.
Granny cooked supper for Anna and me. Her odd dietary fussiness was manifestly obvious in her offerings: pizza on some sort of wholefood base which tasted of cardboard and had no cheese: raw courgettes; and a bizarre bowl containing roasted pumpkin with segments of orange and bits of cinnamon stick. None of it was to my taste. In fact, it was almost as though she’d been blindfolded when she was preparing it, and just randomly grabbed ingredients from the fridge and the cupboard. When she’s being cooked for, Granny’s appetite is voracious and not discerning in the least, but when she cooks for herself, she is meticulously fussy about using ingredients with no fat, oil or butter.
Till Total £612.89
45 Customers
THURSDAY, 27 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Flo’s blackboard for the day:
Money can’t buy happiness, BUT it can buy books (which is basically the same thing).
No orders from Abe for nearly a month, so I emailed Monsoon to check that our database is uploading properly.
Granny’s laptop still hasn’t come back to life, so she’s taken to using the computer in the shop and now, whenever I log on to Facebook, I’m met with the Italian version.
Spent the morning digging a trench in the garden for the sewage pipe for the bothy, in the horizontal rain. I need to get the thing done and the garden reinstated at least two weeks before the festival, which is now less than a month away. Also, the shop has been a mess since we relocated most of the stock that had been in the bothy and dumped it on the floor of the railway room. We really need to get that organised before the festival too, so Granny brought it all into the front room, and Flo checked it and listed what was viable on FBA and boxed it for sending away. The rest we boxed to send to the recycling plant in Glasgow. Flo, to her credit, has listed several hundred books over the past few weeks. Much as I hate to do it, it does solve the problem of space for storing books, and the books – out of our hair – appear to sell more quickly than the stock we list on Amazon that remains in the shop.
We still haven’t started going through the boxes from the house in Carronbridge, for which I paid £750. Nicky can start listing them for sale in the shop tomorrow morning.
Till Total £525.89
42 Customers
FRIDAY, 28 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Nicky, Callum and Robert were all in today.
Nicky proudly thrust a packet of Caramel Digestives in my face the moment she arrived. ‘Look what I found in the Morrisons skip – aye, they’ve melted together, but they’ll still be delicious.’
Granny has been continuously complaining about her knee, so I took her down to the harbour with a bucket and spade so that she could collect enough mud to treat it.
I was digging a hole in the garden to put a post in so that I can extend the log shed to make space for the bags of pellets for the new boiler when Amy, who has asked if she can run a wine bar in the downstairs of Lochancroft (formerly our warehouse, and now where Nicky sleeps when she decides to stay overnight), appeared with her baby. Amy’s a young woman who’s married to a friend a few years younger than I am. She’s from down south, but seems to have adapted remarkably well to Galloway. We went over and looked around and discussed various options, including access. If we decide to make the access via the garden, then I have a colossal amount of clearing up to do before the festival. Eliot has also asked if we can set up a pop-up restaurant in a marquee in the garden (en route to the wine bar) during the festival. I must check the dates to see when it starts, but it is some time in the end of September so I’d better get my skates on, particularly since Flo finishes at the end of next week and Granny is going to be running The Open Book, so I’ll be on my own in the shop for most of the week.
At 3 p.m. the UPS courier arrived to collect fourteen more boxes of stock (which Flo has listed on FBA) and take them to the Amazon warehouse in Dunfermline.
Granny told me that – among her numerous ailments – she suffers from lower back pain, so I told her that I do too, and that I have exercises which the physiotherapist gave me. I’ve been very lazy about doing them, which – if I’m being honest – means that I haven’t done them at all. She told me that from Monday onwards we are going to do them together. She did the mafia pointing and throat cutting thing again which means, apparently, that I have no choice. I called her ‘Mussolini’. She called me a ‘Fucking bastard’.
Made a list of jobs to do before the festival:
Clear the books from the floor of the garden room and railway room, list them on FBA and get the boxes shipped and out of the way
Clear the blocks from the garden and all the rubbish from the bothy
Finish the bothy (about a week’s worth of painting and cleaning)
Get the new stock from the past few deals priced up and on the shelves Get the big room organised for the Writers’ Retreat
Move Emily’s things for Lochancroft/Festival Café to make way for Amy’s wine bar
Put up signs for Amy’s wine bar
Move the garden path from the front of the bothy and seed the lawn
Get the speakers working in the railway room and the Scottish room
Get rooms ready for Stuart Kelly and Robert Twigger, who are staying during the festival
Replace the balcony door on the flat on Lochancroft Lane
Level the top garden so that the pop-up restaurant marquee can go up
Make new shelf labels for the subjects which we’ve relocated from the bothy
Edit Wigtown Show video
Edit Whithorn video for Julia Muir Watt
Organise books for next Random Book Club mail-out
Make insurance claim for the damage caused by the chimney
Repair the chimney
Make cover to protect the new boiler
Make step for front door of the shop
Paint bench in garden
Erect marquee in garden for pop-up restaurant
Take spare insulation to Callum’s
Paint the shop floor
Paint the side door to the house
Replace all the batteries in the lights in the garden
Carol-Ann stayed the night. We cooked a meal between us: Nicky did the vegetables, Anna made brownies (her cooking is diabolical, but she’s an excellent baker), and I made toad in the hole.
Thankfully Granny didn’t contribute anything. We stayed up late and drank too much. Once everyone had finished their food, Granny ripped into the leftovers like a starving piranha and polished the entire lot off – it was about the same amount as we had eaten between us already.
Till Total £236.79
23 Customers
SATURDAY, 29 AUGUST
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
I awoke to the sound of cackling and the smell of burning from the kitchen, came downstairs to find Carol-Ann buttering a charred lump of toast and Nicky eating the leftover brownies, while Granny was making some vile concoction involving soya milk, wheatgerm powder an
d a banana. Anna, meanwhile, was eating a lump of the melted caramel digestive thing that Nicky had brought in yesterday for Foodie Friday. The chocolate had turned a shade of white that I would normally associate with poisonous mushrooms.
Callum in. Robert in. Robert left at 11 a.m. on an emergency call, but returned at 2 p.m., then left again at four.
The Saturday market which happens in Wigtown during the summer occasionally hires a piper to play some tunes for an hour, and today was such a day. As I was packing to go to Edinburgh, I was thinking of Anna, and how devastating it must be for her to be leaving the place and people she loves so much. At 3 p.m. the piper played ‘Will ye no come back again’. As the spectre of her impending departure looms ever closer, I’m questioning whether this is the right thing to be doing. I’m forty-four and want a family. She’s thirty-two and, despite our differences, there’s far more that unites us than divides us.
With every year that passes, I see my friends with their children – who I’ve known since they were babies – sending them off to university, or to lives of their own, and I see the chances of me having a family of my own slip slowly out of my grasp. The vision of children grows more hazy with the passage of time. Now the children I had hoped for are almost invisible: not just ghosts, but the shadows of ghosts. Like Rosie Probert in Under Milk Wood, they seem to be ‘going into the darkness of the darkness forever’.
Anna and I left Wigtown for Edinburgh at about 1.30 p.m. We stopped for her to say goodbye to my parents and arrived at my sister Lulu’s at about 5.30. Lulu had invited Vikki, my other sister, and her husband, Alex, over for supper with two of their children, Rosie and Lily. Lulu’s schoolfriend Meach and her fiancé Ben came too. After a fairly staid start, we ended up drinking, dancing and singing until 5.30 a.m.