Confessions of a Bookseller
Page 24
Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller
Without wishing to spend too much time stereotyping customers, I’m about to do precisely that. This second kind described by Baxter is sadly all too common. More often than not they will ask you a question and give you a window of silence in which to answer it, but the moment you open your mouth to do just that, they’ll begin telling you why they asked you the question, or they’ll repeat the question, or rephrase it. Whichever it is, you can guarantee that this will happen every time you open your mouth, and for several minutes at a time. I once had an Australian woman ask me where the gardening books were. I must have made ten attempts to answer, each of which was talked over until eventually I sat down and started listing books on the computer until she stopped talking.
This same type will, as Baxter points out, breezily ignore any contradiction to whatever they happen to be saying, and loudly talk over you as you explain that it was Edward Gibbon, not Evelyn Waugh, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or that C. S. Forester, not E. M. Forster, wrote the Hornblower novels.
The transfer of payment also provides scope for a range of behaviours. There are customers who do, as Baxter points out, slap the money onto the counter in what appears to be a gesture of power (only men do this, in my experience), and others who will, with painfully slow deliberation, extract the coins from their wallets or purses and pile them onto the counter. Once finished, they will generally push them weakly towards you. And finally there are others who seem less afraid of physical contact, who will push the money into your upturned palm. Customers from anywhere south of Manchester tend to demand English notes in their change. Callum once told me that when he paid for tobacco in a petrol station in England with a Scottish £20 note the man behind the counter in the shop made a great show of holding it up to the light to check for a watermark, tutting all the while. When Callum received his change, which contained an English £10 note, he did the same thing.
In the fourteen years since I bought the shop, I’ve taken Isle of Man notes, Northern Irish notes, euros and even English notes, and I’ve never once had any of them rejected by the bank when I’ve lodged them, but for some reason businesses in England – and it gets worse the further south you go – don’t like Scottish notes. Once, when I’d just left school, I was in London and needed to take a bus somewhere (I forget where). The fare was 45p, and when I handed him a Scottish £1 note, the bus driver refused to take it. I ended up writing him a cheque for the fare.
THURSDAY, 1 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Today was my forty-fifth birthday. Nicky was in, so I got up and made sure that everything was OK, lit the fire in the Writers’ Retreat, then went back to bed for an hour as a birthday treat.
Every year my birthday falls in the middle of the festival, in the same way that, when I was a child, it always fell shortly after going back to boarding-school. Probably because of that, the day assumes no importance for me. When I turned eight, I had been at boarding-school for a month. The school would provide a cake whenever it was a pupil’s birthday. It was a confection of such revoltingness that it would probably now be in breach of health and safety regulations, but in comparison with the rest of the food offered to us by the cook, Mr Swiggs (a former prison cook who would chain-smoke over the pots of gruel he prepared), it was both nectar and ambrosia, and we fell upon it like vultures.
At 11 a.m. I drove to the Newton Stewart dump with the rubbish from the Retreat. While I was there I bumped into Hugh Mann, a retired antique dealer who I’ve known for years. We used to meet at the auction in Dumfries. We had a curious conversation about the ‘Degenerate Artists’ (as described by the Nazi Party) – Hugh thinks he’s found an important collection of paintings, but Hugh often thinks this. On my way back from the dump I went for a swim in the River Luce and in the sea to mark the passing of another year. Normally I do this with Anna and some friends, but for some reason (possibly because I can no longer say that I’m in my early forties) I felt particularly morose this year and chose to do it alone.
At two o’clock my parents turned up with a cake (lemon meringue) with a candle that played a tinny ‘Happy Birthday’ tune which refused to stop, even when it was in my mother’s bag after I’d threatened to smash it with a hammer. The author and doctor Gavin Francis (who’s talking at the festival) witnessed my mother singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and producing my birth ID tag, baby booties and various other embarrassing things. For some reason, my mother is obsessed with the most horrendous tat: candles that play ‘Happy Birthday’ when you light them, Christmas decorations with motion sensors that start singing ‘Jingle Bells’ when you walk past them; anything that makes my sisters and me squirm she seems to adore. She had a fake Christmas pudding in the bathroom of their house at Christmas a few years ago which erupted into song just as you were about to sit on the loo. The number of visitors it surprised was clear from the number of times the words ‘Jesus Christ!’ could be heard shouted from the loo over the festive period.
For reasons that are probably obvious, in the past few years when I see my father on my birthday, I think of what he’d achieved when he was my age. When he turned forty-five, I was sixteen years old, and my sisters fourteen and ten. He’d married, moved from Somerset to Galloway with my mother, bought a farm and made enough money to send Vikki and me to boarding-school. I can’t compare my own achievements favourably.
Peggy, manager of the Dundee Literary Festival and one of the fixtures of the Book Festival; a voracious reader and quick wit, and her partner Colin and Stuart gave me a bottle of Talisker, Twigger gave me a bottle of sake. Carol-Ann and Laurie each made me a birthday cake.
Closed the shop at 7.30 p.m.
Stuart’s friends Rebecca and Olivia turned up at eight o’clock, and Stuart and Laurie cooked supper, supposedly for ten people: two chickens and some vegetables. About thirty people turned up. The lemon meringue cake was produced for pudding, and opinion was divided on it (it was revolting, but people were being polite). Eliot helped himself to a large portion, then complained at considerable length about it, while continuing to devour it.
There was an event tonight in Amy’s wine bar: The Midge, a Wigtown version of the New York event The Moth, an informal storytelling evening. About three years ago I converted our warehouse into a sort of drawing room/club for the festival. I bought everything (furniture, pictures etc.) at auctions – including a huge Edwardian photo portrait of three boys in a gilt frame. The Midge event was called ‘Lost and Found’ and involved people telling stories about things they’d lost and found. One woman sat through until the very end, then put her hand up to speak. She pointed at the Edwardian portrait and said, ‘I’ve come here from Cheshire for the festival. The boy in the middle of that picture is my uncle Frank. We accidentally put that picture into an auction about ten years ago and I’ve been looking for it ever since.’
Bed at 2.30 a.m. after reading The New Confessions for twenty minutes. Todd has now survived the war and is making films in Berlin. Plagued by ill-fortune, his magnum opus – an adaptation of Rousseau’s Confessions – is completed as a silent movie, just as sound is introduced in film, and predictably flops.
Till Total £308.16
29 Customers
FRIDAY, 2 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Nicky arrived looking surprisingly smart, and with a hint of make-up, which means that she’s seen something in the programme that she wants to go to, or that there’s someone who’ll be in the Retreat when she has her lunch up there that she wants to talk to. I looked through the programme, but couldn’t work out who it was. The only names I recognised were Yannis Palaiologos, Don Paterson and Kirsty Logan, but I’m certain that it’s not one of them.
Laurie and the girls set up the Retreat, which was the busiest it has been since Monday. Eliot tends to fit more events in on the second Friday, as people are
more likely to come earlier for the weekend, and audiences are usually bigger then.
Ben and Beth insisted on going for a swim, so we went to Rigg Bay in the afternoon for a plunge into the sea.
At four o’clock a woman who’s involved in a musical event this evening with the National Theatre of Scotland asked if we had somewhere that she could warm up, so I showed her to the snug. Beautiful strains of a violin emanated from there for the rest of the afternoon.
Overheard a couple in the Writers’ Retreat:
Her: Can we drink as much of this wine as we like?
Him: Yes, let’s drink as much as we can.
According to Twigger, this is the mentality of most writers to anything that’s free, but particularly food and wine.
At 6 p.m. the two large polystyrene cool boxes full of lobsters were delivered to the retreat by the man from the Galloway Smokehouse.
Stuart and Eliot disappeared at about 7 p.m. for an event in which they’re both on the panel. It’s a discussion of the books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which is announced on 13 October. Stuart was one of the judges for this a few years ago, and will undoubtedly have read everything on this year’s shortlist, and possibly even the longlist. I’ve never seen anyone devour a book as quickly as Stuart can: he has an eidetic memory and can literally flick through a 600-page book in a couple of hours and not only have actually ‘read’ it but be able to retrieve any detail from within it with pinpoint accuracy.
Closed the shop at 8 p.m.
The small German woman stayed the night again. She’s very friendly and chatty, but – as yet – why she’s here is a complete mystery.
Till Total £419.83
39 Customers
SATURDAY, 3 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Today was the penultimate day of the festival, and I am exhausted after so many late nights. I opened the shop at 9 a.m., and a fresh-faced Nicky wandered in shortly afterwards.
Granny asked if she could borrow a bike so that she could explore the area, since it was a beautiful day. She set off at 10 a.m. and told me that she’d be back late in the afternoon. Five minutes later she reappeared: the chain had come off. ‘Oh sorry, I have breaked de bicycle.’ I fixed it, and she set off again.
Finn’s brother Rob and his wife, Sally, had an event this morning with local man Roy Walter about rural activism. All three of them have successfully fought campaigns against large organisations who wanted to force their land to different uses: Rob and Sally’s farm in Australia was under threat from an open-cast coal mine, while Roy saw off an offshore wind farm that was proposed for Wigtown Bay. They all came to the Retreat afterwards for lobster and salad.
Alex Salmond was talking at the festival today. I spotted him in the Writers’ Retreat, but didn’t have an opportunity to say hello. As he was walking from the shop to the marquee for his event, a huge crowd gathered in his wake. Nicky looked out of the window and commented, ‘Eh, you’d think it was Jay Z, looking at that, not that wee bampot.’
Tonight was the annual Festival Ceilidh. I wore my kilt, but because I’ve lost so much weight in the past three months, it kept falling down, much to the amusement of Siobhan, who’s running WTF (Wigtown, The Festival, the part of the festival for younger people). At every opportunity she grabbed it and did her utmost to wrestle it down as far as she could. The event became a case of trying to keep as much distance between me and her as possible. Danced with Granny and Laurie, as well as (reluctantly) Siobhan.
Afterwards, everyone (including Siobhan and her parents) came back to the Retreat and continued late into the night.
Bed at 3 a.m.
Till Total £519.50
49 Customers
SUNDAY, 4 OCTOBER
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Opened the shop at 9 a.m. to find that Monsoon had crashed.
Kirsty Wark was in the Retreat at lunchtime with her publisher, Lisa. They were heading to Loch Doon, the subject of Kirsty’s new book. Loch Doon is a reservoir in Ayrshire, in the middle of which was a castle steeped in legend and history. Before they flooded the site, the hydro operators were forced to move the castle, stone by stone, to a new location on the banks of what was to become the loch, and rebuild it exactly as it had been.
Fiona, the woman who had spotted the portrait of her uncle at the event in Amy’s wine bar, appeared at 2 p.m. to ask if she could buy it from me. I recall paying very little for it, and since she had far more right to it than I did, I told her she could have it for nothing. She was on the verge of tears when I handed it to her.
Visitors to the Writers’ Retreat today included Janice Galloway and Matt Haig. Max Arthur dropped in at 4 p.m. to say goodbye before heading back to London.
As I was taking bin bags of waste from the Retreat downstairs to the bins, I passed a customer, a young woman who had been browsing in the craft section, who was gazing up at the top landing. She stopped me and asked if there was anyone up there. I assured her that there was nobody there. I’d been up there five minutes earlier and nobody had been up since. She was convinced that she’d seen a figure wearing black walk silently from one end of the landing to the other. It must have been either the cat or her imagination.
Closed the shop at 6 p.m. Festival over.
Laurie and I moved all the furniture in the big room while Eliot watched, casually sipping a glass of white wine. Afterwards we watched a Woody Allen film. About ten minutes in, I noticed that almost everyone had fallen asleep, and another ten minutes later so had I.
Till Total £457.78
40 Customers
MONDAY, 5 OCTOBER
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Granny opened the shop, so I slept in until 10.30 a.m. then got up and said goodbye to Stuart, who left at eleven, then Twigger left at noon, and as I was saying goodbye to him outside the shop, I spotted my sofa on the pavement: Eliot had asked to borrow it for the duration of the festival for a venue called The Living Room. The men dismantling the marquees must have just dumped it there. Twigger gave me a hand getting it back upstairs.
After he’d gone, I drove to the dump with eighteen bin bags from the Retreat, as always – after the weekend – reeking of lobster and dribbling stinking juice all over the back of the van.
The big marquee in the square came down by 2 p.m., leaving the yellowed grass behind where it had stood. I spent much of the remainder of the day moving things back into the big room from the snug, where they’d been stored during the festival, like the television, footstool etc.
After the shop was closed, Granny cooked home-made pizzas for the interns and we set about getting the house back to relative normality. After supper Eliot and Yvonne, who also came over for pizza, had a massive argument in the kitchen, so the interns, Granny and I left them to it and retreated to the snug with a bottle of wine.
Bed at 2 a.m.
Till Total £76.30
5 Customers
TUESDAY, 6 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
Callum came in to start work on building a roof over the new boiler before the winter sets in, now that he’s finished the bothy. Carol-Ann seems to quite like the bothy and has asked if she can stay there for a bit longer.
After lunch a young couple brought in a box of books, mainly Just William, Jennings and Enid Blyton paperbacks – all good sellers – for which I gave them £20.
An Italian customer who had been here during the summer (and spotted a three-volume set of Glasgow Geography) telephoned to order it. Fortunately Granny answered the call, and he was able to order it in Italian.
Over supper, Granny and I discussed her returning to Italy following the summer’s work experience. She’s reluctant to return.
Till Total £106.98
5 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 7 OCTOBER
Online orders: 1
Orders found: 1
; I opened the shop ten minutes late to find Mole-Man staring through the glass window of the front door, hand-shielding his eyes for a better view inside. He clearly didn’t see me approaching and almost fell flat on his face when I opened the door and his weight was no longer supported by it. He raced past me and on into the cavernous depths of the shop.
Granny appeared at 10 a.m., so I went upstairs to continue the post-festival clear-up. So far, since the end of the festival, I’ve found nine cables from people’s laptops and phones in various parts of the house, which will – in part – make up for the number that Eliot inadvertently wanders off with throughout the year.
When I came down to let Granny have a lunch break, Mole-Man was scuttling out of the front door, weighed down by armfuls of books. Granny asked me, ‘Why he never say naffink, this man?’
Till Total £171.48
7 Customers
THURSDAY, 8 OCTOBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 3
Opened the shop at 9 a.m.
Callum in at 11 a.m. The sound of drilling, hammering and crashing about echoed through the shop for most of the day.
I left Granny in charge and went to the Steam Packet for lunch, then to Cruggleton and Rigg Bay for a walk.
Till Total £180
10 Customers
FRIDAY, 9 OCTOBER