Back home at 5.30 p.m., so I heated up the casserole I’d cooked last night for supper. Granny and I sat down to eat it at 8 p.m. At about 8.30 I went out to do more work on the bothy. When I got back in at ten, I discovered that Granny had once again eaten the entire casserole. I had anticipated that it would last me until Sunday, but on the strength of experience I probably ought to have guessed that she’d devour the entire thing. When I mentioned it to her, she replied, ‘Fuck off, fucking bastard.’ The cursing side of her English vocabulary has considerably expanded since she arrived.
Bed at 4.30 a.m. after a late Skype with Anna, who seems resigned to settling back in America, although she clearly feels that Scotland is her spiritual home.
Till Total £257.88
26 Customers
FRIDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
Nicky shuffled in just after 9 a.m. She started the day with a hectoring lecture about evolution and what a ridiculous concept it is. After only three hours’ sleep, I wasn’t really in the mood.
It was a windy day, but sunny. At 11.30 three people from the National Theatre of Scotland arrived in the shop for a photo shoot as part of the pre-festival publicity.
Granny was in The Open Book, and shortly after she’d left to open it, Anna emailed me from America to tell me that she’d been interviewed on Radio New Zealand about it, so I went online and listened to it. She was extremely impressive, except when she attributed Ring of Bright Water to John Buchan rather than Gavin Maxwell.
Once Nicky had settled down from her evolutionary rant, I drove to the dump in Whithorn (12 miles away) with some waste materials from the bothy.
Bum-Bag Dave came in mid-afternoon, presumably doing his usual circuit on the bus. Now that he has a bus pass he makes the very most of it, and seems to go from one public library to the next using free public transport. He spent about ten minutes in the shop, with various watches, phones and other things beeping frequently, as they always do. As he left, he told me that he was going to go and see who was running The Open Book, so I quickly called Granny to warn her. When she came back at 4.30 having closed the shop, she asked me, ‘Who this man with all the bags? He is a clochard?’ Once we’d established that he was not a homeless man, I explained that we call him Bum-Bag Dave, to which she replied, ‘His name is Big Bad Dave?’
Till Total £212.40
17 Customers
SATURDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 1
Awoke to the smell of baking and went downstairs to discover Granny making muffins with beer and bacon. She gave me strict instructions to eat them all. Despite the promising sound of the ingredients, they were utterly revolting.
Nicky came in at 9.10 a.m. I felt rotten, so went back to bed for a couple of hours after she’d arrived, but not before I had asked her to price up the boxes of fishing books from the Carronbridge deal, but she decided that her time would be better spent checking books that are already on the shelves and have already been listed.
Telephone call after lunch from Ian, a fellow bookseller from Hull, asking me if I’ve ever been reported to Amazon for selling a ‘banned book’. Apparently they’d been in touch to rebuke him for selling a history of the Second World War that had a swastika on the cover (almost all books about the Second World War have a swastika on the cover). When he asked them for a list of banned books, they told him that there was no such list, and that they react when notified by a complaint from a customer. Ian – quite fairly – asked them how booksellers could be expected to know what is going to cause offence and to whom, to which they appeared to have no answer.
Ian is a book dealer, and has been for about thirty years. He ran a successful bookshop in Hull until Oxfam opened a shop next door to him a few years ago. He extracted a promise from their management that it would not become a charity bookshop, but it did, and with volunteer staff, books donated for free, rate and rent concessions and no tax to pay, there was only ever going to be one consequence. Ian, who paid his staff, paid for his books, paid tax, paid rates and paid full rent could not possibly compete and had to close his shop.
Went for a bath at 6 p.m. and asked Granny if she needed to use the bathroom before I dived in. She replied that she likes to have a bath early in the morning because she enjoys a long soak and likes to make herself look nice before facing the world – ‘I am very-a slug in de baf.’
Me: Do you know who else is a slug in the bath? Eliot.
Granny: Yes, but Eliot look-a like a woman.
Till Total £296.49
18 Customers
MONDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Granny was in the shop today. Her turn to do the blackboard:
GUESS!
In this bookshop we sell:
– words
– paper
– dreams
– illusions
– grapefruits
– bo … what?
I have no idea what she meant.
At 11 a.m. a customer arrived with a parrot (called Jacob) in a cage, which she left on the counter while she browsed. I tried to sell her a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but she quite wisely refused to engage with the whole thing. Granny was infatuated with the parrot, and spoke to it in Italian for about ten minutes, as if being locked in a tiny cage wasn’t punishment enough for the poor creature.
Email from Laura at Byre Books reminding me that we have a meeting of the AWB on Wednesday evening at Beltie Books, at 5.30 p.m. After the death of her husband, Robbie, Fiona (Box of Frogs, the shop next door to mine) stood down as secretary. I volunteered to take her place, so I wrote the agenda for the meeting and emailed it to all the other members.
Till Total £170.46
18 Customers
TUESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Granny was at The Open Book today, so I was stuck alone in the shop.
As I was opening up, I heard the unmistakable honking of geese and looked up to see a skein of about fifty or so flying low overhead. I can imagine, if you’ve never seen it before, that a low-flying skein of geese could be quite a startling sight. Once, walking to a friend’s house in Wigtown at dusk, I saw a skein of several hundred – possibly even a thousand birds – flying in a nearly perfect V formation, all honking as they headed for the salt marsh for the night. The farm I grew up on had a wide area of salt marsh, so seeing them every winter wasn’t anything unusual when I was a child, but after moving back here after five years of living in Bristol, witnessing their return in autumn made me appreciate quite what an extraordinary sight it really is.
There was a letter in today’s post from the Inland Revenue about the new automatic enrolment to pension schemes for employees. I emailed them to check whether or not I fall into the exempt category because I only have part-time staff and received a reply that left me even more bewildered than I had been prior to its receipt:
The automatic enrolment legislation will affect all employers with at least one member of staff. If there is anyone employed who falls into the category below, then there will be a requirement to set up a pension scheme. If there is already an existing pension scheme (i.e. a stakeholder pension scheme) in place for those who meet the criteria, they can remain the pension scheme without being automatically enrolled providing the scheme is a qualifying one.
• Aged 22 – SPA
• Earning above £833 monthly or £192 weekly
If there is no one who falls into the category above, then there will still be automatic enrolment duties towards your member(s) of staff. You will need to write to these employees detailing their rights towards automatic enrolment and may need to set up a pension scheme (only if they request it).
Emailed them back requesting an explanation of SPA. Apparently it is State Pension Age.
Wiley, the fish man, turned u
p at 10 a.m., so I bought some smoked haddock as I have promised to make Cullen Skink for Granny tonight. Wiley normally turns up on a Friday. He has a small white van, and drives various routes – a different one for every day of the week – selling fresh fish from the back of it. Not only is the quality of his fish vastly superior to supermarket-bought, the range is fantastic, and he comes to your door. Janetta, who keeps the shop and the house clean and tidy, was chatting recently about the days of her childhood on a farm, miles from the nearest shop. Back then farms employed a good many more people than they do now, and not very many people had cars. Many of those farms wouldn’t be anywhere near the bus routes, and Janetta remembers that the butcher’s van would do a farm run every week, and the grocer’s and the baker’s vans would visit twice a week. Many people would barely have any need to leave their farms for most of their lives. Even their clothes were supplied by hawkers who would go from farm to farm.
At 4 p.m. a customer asked, ‘Do you have any books with pictures in them?’ No more specifics were forthcoming.
Cooked Cullen Skink for supper, then worked in the Bothy until 10 p.m. Sadly it will be finished and inhabitable too late for Granny to use it, but it might come in useful as a spare room during the festival.
Till Total £110
7 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Granny was in the shop today, as one of the volunteers is covering The Open Book.
Amy, who’s going to be running the pop-up wine bar in our old warehouse at the end of the garden during the festival, came round with her father-in-law, Robin, to inspect the premises. I’ve known Robin since I was a child, and he and I enjoy being extremely rude to one another. I think Amy may have found it a little unsettling.
Three customers (two old women and an old man) were milling about the shop telling me about sets of Shakespeare and Waverley novels they want to sell when the old man announced that the reason they were here was because he’d read Anna’s book about coming to live in Wigtown, Three Things You Need To Know about Rockets. Apparently he’d taken it out of his local library in Morecambe after reading Neil Armstrong’s autobiography in an effort to learn more about rockets, only to discover that it has very little to do with rockets at all. Unperturbed, he read it anyway and enjoyed it, and gave a copy to his wife for her birthday, then decided to make the pilgrimage to Wigtown.
Back exercises with Granny at 6 p.m., as usual. Shortly afterwards, as I was cooking mince and tatties (introducing her to Scottish cuisine), I dropped an onion skin on the floor. We both bent down to pick it up, groaning in agony as our backs clicked and spasmed.
At 8.30 I remembered the AWB meeting that I was supposed to attend at Beltie Books three hours earlier as secretary for the first time. Too late. It would have been over by seven.
Eliot arrived. Did the washing up before bed and discovered that Granny had scoffed the remaining mince and tatties.
Till Total £338.81
30 Customers
THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Came down for breakfast at 8.15 a.m. to find Granny in the kitchen, giggling about the fact that Eliot had been in the bathroom since eight o’clock, with the radio blaring. He has yet to re-tune the radio in the kitchen (permanently on Radio 4) to Radio 5 Live, which he normally does within an hour or so of arriving so that he can listen to a football match.
Maria arrived at 11 a.m. to discuss the catering arrangements for the festival. She’s done the catering for the past few years in the Writers’ Retreat during the festival. On the weekends it is particularly busy, and she usually has two girls to help her, mainly with waitressing and cleaning. Sometimes, when it’s full of writers and visiting speakers, we all have to lend a hand to keep up with demand. Other times, when it’s quiet, the girls sit silently in the kitchen, on Facebook or messaging on their phones.
Granny explained her unusual eating habits to me. Apparently a few years ago she went on a diet and lost a lot of weight. This involved only eating protein all week apart from one day, on which you can gorge on carbohydrates. The problem is that now, whenever she is presented with food containing carbohydrates, her natural instinct is to gorge, even though she’s no longer on the diet.
I drove to the dump after lunch to drop off more rubbish from the bothy construction. The book festival starts next Friday, and the plumber hasn’t finished yet. I called him and he assured me that he’ll be here on Monday. Bought a haggis from Kenny, the butcher in Newton Stewart.
Granny spent the day listing the sci-fi collection on FBA.
Eliot appeared in the house at 7.30, when I was working in the bothy. Granny told me that he strolled into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took one look, made a face of bitter disappointment, took out a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass, then sat down and drank it. Apparently when she eventually managed to get into the bathroom in the morning to ‘put in order the face’, she went to wash her hair and discovered that he’d used all her shampoo. She’s gone from being amused by his antics to finding them irritating. Mercifully, he’s oblivious to it. Granny came out to help me paint the bothy, possibly for a bit of peace and quiet.
Till Total £122.30
9 Customers
FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Awoke at about 7.30 a.m. to the sound of doors slamming shut and someone talking very loudly. Got up to discover Eliot stomping about the place on the phone to his wife. Granny was in the kitchen, silently drinking her coffee and trying to read. As I put the kettle on, Eliot marched in and sat down, and continued his telephone conversation while riffling through some papers on the table, which included my life insurance policy, a letter from Anna and some overdue invoices. I caught Granny’s eye. She looked furious. I went back to bed with a cup of tea and tripped over Eliot’s shoes, which he’d kicked off and deposited in the doorway. Managed to salvage about a third of the tea; the rest went over the carpet.
Slept in until 8.30. Got up to find the bathroom locked and Eliot in there listening to the radio. He emerged at about 9.15.
I’m starting to realise how much I’m going to miss Granny when she leaves after the festival, not just for all the work she does, but because I’ve grown to like her, even if I can’t understand a word she says. She’s extremely entertaining. Yesterday evening, when we were painting the outside of the bothy, we were talking about mortality. She told me, ‘I fink I will die when-a I was thirty years old.’
Till Total £375
21 Customers
SATURDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Nicky was in again today. She’s very obliging in the run-up to the festival, and deals with the steadily increasing pressure with a level head. Her Facebook update for today:
Shortlist for Today’s Prize Customer …
1. Brings 2 mint books to counter, ‘Just what I’m after’, then gives me 10 minutes of family connection to said book, when asked for £4 leaves it on counter because ‘the original price is £2.50’.
2. ‘Can i pay to have a piddle, hen?? ‘Well, can i go out the back?’ …on his return ‘That’s lovely pipework you’ve got out there.
3. Customer stands tapping money on counter, watches me atop a very high, very shoogly ladder, when i come down. ‘Where can i buy a lottery ticket – and what would you buy with your winning millions, eh? New white socks to match your grey jobby-catchers?’
Spent the day in the bothy, painting and tidying up. After supper, went over to Lochancroft – the old warehouse – where Amy is going to have her pop-up wine bar and painted the concrete floor there. Emily (a young artist who rents it as a studio) has moved all her things out for the duration of the festival, and Amy is going to start setting up on Monday.
Till Total £661.90
35 Customers
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SUNDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER
Online orders:
Orders found:
Awoke to a clamour from the kitchen. Came downstairs to find Eliot filling every pot, pan and tray in the kitchen with food. He told me that he’d decided to invite some friends around for lunch. Lunch lasted from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., and the interns turned up, as well as Finn and Ella. Eliot spent the entire meal checking his phone, texting and emailing. He’s under a great deal of pressure in the run-up to the festival, and with over 200 events crammed into ten days, it’s inevitable that he’ll have to field texts and emails around the clock.
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 22