Confessions of a Bookseller
Page 30
At lunchtime, I cycled the 5 miles to my parents’ house for lunch with their friends Bill and Tess. Bill is in his nineties and one of my favourite people, and Tess is wickedly entertaining too, so the bike ride back in the half-light was fuelled by wine and laughter.
Home and read most of the rest of The New Confessions. It is starting to read like a practice run for Any Human Heart. Extremely good, and thoroughly researched and informed, but slightly lacking the warmth of the later book.
SATURDAY, 26 DECEMBER
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 5
Opened the shop at 10 a.m. The first customer appeared at 2.45, to return a £3 copy of a Simenon novel, green Penguin, which I’d sold to a nervous farmer on Christmas Eve for his wife. It turned out that she had – as he was worried – already read it. Not the most auspicious of starts to what is normally the busiest week of the winter.
I picked and packed the orders and took them to the post office. I opened the door to be met by William, so I asked him if it was open. He just grunted ‘No’ at me, then turned around and carried on with whatever it was he had been doing, without the slightest pleasantry.
I wrote another haiku for the blackboard:
Boxing day is here.
Run away to a bookshop:
Escape the fake cheer.
Only one other customer appeared and she told me that she was only here ‘to get out of the rain’.
In all, it wasn’t worth bothering opening the shop. Although there are people around, they probably assumed we’d be closed.
Till Total £44.30
6 Customers
MONDAY, 28 DECEMBER
Online orders: 7
Orders found: 5
Packed up the orders and took them over to the post office, which was shut again.
Telephone call at 10 a.m. from a customer looking for a local history book:
Customer: I’m looking for a book called Borgue Academy, written by Adam Gray.
Me: Yes, we’ve got three copies of that.
Customer: Let me tell you why I’m looking for it. We’re off to New Zealand next week, and we’re visiting someone whose father was from this area and we thought it would be nice etc …
I have no idea why people feel the need to offer lengthy explanations as to why they’re looking for particular titles – it’s not as though it makes any difference to whether or not we’ve got the book in stock, but it never seems to stop them.
The shop was completely dead until 11.30, at which point twenty-two people came in, an extended Jewish family. Most of them bought something, including copies of Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets.
Four former employees ganged up on me and decided that we should have had a Christmas party in the shop, so I invited my sister and her husband too. Catherine, who was in the Readers’ Retreat back in February, arrived with her son Miles, on their way back south from Christmas in the Highlands, and the Spanish couple who are running The Open Book came too. Christmas is normally a time of year when everyone else has time off but I don’t. In fact, I usually end up working more hours than usual and generally on my own, so to be forced by former employees to have a party in the house, and for other people to turn up out of the blue, lent the place a convivial atmosphere and for the first time in years I felt a bit of Christmas spirit. But not much.
Bed at 3.30 a.m.
Till Total £101.48
9 Customers
TUESDAY, 29 DECEMBER
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
I opened the shop at 10 a.m. with a hangover, but to my delight everyone else had tidied up the house after last night’s celebrations. I have no idea when they did it, but it was an enormous relief to come down to a clean kitchen.
In the post today was a letter from the planning department telling me that they’ve approved planning permission for the concrete book spirals. The sense of relief was almost physical: I had to sit down after I’d absorbed the news. A customer came in at eleven o’clock and asked for ‘religious books’, so I pointed him at the theology section. After about a minute he returned to the counter and asked, ‘Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?’
Catherine and Miles left at about noon.
A young woman bought a copy of the Kama Sutra and offered to do a reading from it for Facebook. I thought it best to decline.
There’s more wintery weather coming; Storm Frank is forecast to bring heavy rain and high winds tonight and tomorrow.
Finished The Master and Margarita at midnight, as the howling wind and lashing rain beat at the front of the house. It was nothing like I’d expected, or anything I’d read before. It’s an extraordinary book, the cleverest and most wonderfully evocative use of the supernatural of any book I’ve read, although Hogg’s Justified Sinner might pip it at the post, now that I think about it.
Till Total £132.99
13 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 30 DECEMBER
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 4
Torrential rain all night and this morning thanks to Storm Frank. Apparently Newton Stewart (7 miles away) is badly flooded, with hundreds of people evacuated from their homes and put up in the Macmillan hall.
Callum came in to tile the kitchen and the bathroom in the bothy.
Maya Tolstoy called in to say hello at lunchtime. Her mother, Margie, lives in the Old Station House in Wigtown and is a wonderful woman, generous to a fault, and with a towering intellect. I met Maya a few years ago at Margie’s and we became friends. She – like her mother – is enormously intelligent and charming. She lives in New York but comes back to Scotland as often as she can to visit her parents. At the same time Jess Pym, whose parents live locally, also popped in to say hello, then Tom and Willeke appeared too, to discuss Hogmanay plans. The shop can very easily become a bit of a social hub for estranged Gallovidians at this time of year. I was hoping to have a night in on my own, but they’re insisting that we all get together. Christmas holidays are a strange time when you have a shop whose income is almost totally dependent on footfall. Everyone is on holiday and wants to have a good time, but for me it’s essential that the shop is open, so I can’t really join in. I suppose it suits my misanthropic nature to have an excuse to avoid being sociable, the party a few nights ago being the exception.
Paula (one of the two Spanish women running The Open Book) came to ask me if I could scan and print copies of a poster that she’s made inviting everyone in the town to come to the shop at 4 p.m. tomorrow to share the Spanish new year tradition of eating grapes.
At 1.01 p.m. the internet and the mobile phone networks went down across the whole peninsula, so I went to the post office to get an update on what was going on. They’ve shut down the electricity sub-station in Newton Stewart because of the floods.
At three o’clock I spotted a butterfly on the lamp in the shop. It flew around for a while, to the wonder of the customers until it disappeared. The bloody cat probably ate it. He has a penchant for butterflies. When I went to the co-op to pick up a loaf of bread after I’d closed the shop, I discovered that people had been panic buying because of the floods (we are officially cut off) and the shelves were completely bare, so I scratched around in the cupboards at home and found flour and yeast, and had a go at making my own. The result was a substance so dense that I suspect I may have created a new element. Periodic table, make space for Bythellium.
Finished The New Confessions after work. Adored it. In another example of injustice beyond his control, Todd falls victim to the McCarthy witch hunts. I won’t ruin the ending, although I’ve probably ruined the rest of it. Doomed relationships, moving in exalted cultural circles, disasters – it really is a template for Any Human Heart.
Till Total £185.50
11 Customers
THURSDAY, 31 DECEMBER
Online orders:
Orders found:
Awoke at 6.30 to the news that Newton Ste
wart’s flooding is so bad that it’s made the national news. The River Cree burst its banks, and the whole of Princes Street was flooded.
The internet was still down because of the flooding, so I couldn’t check the online orders.
Jeff the minister dropped in at ten o’clock to kill fifteen minutes while he waited for the bus. He spotted my copy of Any Human Heart on the counter and told me how much he’d enjoyed A Good Man in Africa. We had a very interesting chat about contemporary fiction. He’s into Jonathan Franzen at the moment, an author I’ve never read.
Dropped off a parcel at the post office. Wilma has modified the Christmas opening hours notice. Perhaps a judicious insertion of the word ‘not’ between ‘We’re’ and ‘here’ might have been more accurate.
The mobile phone signal came back at 11 a.m., but still no internet connection. What little frustration this is causing me is significantly outweighed by the fact that, since I can’t deal with the orders or list books online, I have the luxury of having little option but to read a book, so I started reading another spoof autobiography, Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself, a book I’d never heard of, but which Anna found in a bookshop in Edinburgh and thought I’d enjoy. This is more like the old days, before the tyranny of the internet, and it was an enormous pleasure to spend the entire day reading, with a few interruptions, Augustus Carp, which so far has proved to be one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Augustus, the narrator of his own life as he sees it, is magnificently pompous, self-righteous and completely hypocritical. He has much in common with Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, and I wonder of John Kennedy Toole had read it before he put pen to paper.
Sophie Dixon, a friend I first met ten years ago, dropped in for a cup of coffee and a chat on her way to stay with mutual friends for Hogmanay. They very kindly invited me too, but I had already agreed to spend the evening with Tom and Willeke, Callum and the Spanish women from The Open Book.
An old woman came in with a middle-aged, considerably overweight man. She introduced him (with a broad Geordie accent) as her son. ‘He’s come up from London. He always comes to this shop when he’s here. He loves it.’ Two hours later, as they left, she said, ‘This is the first time he’s left here empty-handed’ – words guaranteed to make you question the quality of your stock.
We were back online at 5.30, too late to pick and pack the orders and get them to the post office in time for collection, so now they’ll have to wait until Tuesday.
After I closed the shop, I went to the pub with Tom, Willeke, Callum, Sigrid and the Spanish women. The atmosphere was dismal so we all came back here after about an hour and cooked up a load of pizzas and drank until about 1 a.m. They all stayed the night, apart from the Spanish women, who went back to The Open Book. For several years I celebrated Hogmanay with twenty or so friends in the Loch Maree Hotel, which we booked for a week (it closes for the winter, but we managed to convince the owner to give us the key). It was always a highlight of the year, and often the highland landscape was dusted with snow for it. Recently, though, Hogmanay has become a more sedate, often solitary, affair, so it was a pleasure to see out the old year and bring in the new one in the company of friends.
Till Total £202.49
17 Customers
EPILOGUE
The shop is now busier than it was when I wrote this year of the diary, in part – I think – because people have begun to realise that online trade has an impact on the high street. Now that more than 50 per cent of retail purchases are made online, it is unlikely that the trend will reverse, but nobody wants to live in a place where shops are closing all around them and nothing is moving in to fill the void. Even governments have finally begun to recognise that the demise of the high street and the questionable tax affairs of online giants are having a deleterious effect on people’s lives.
Nicky, as far as I know, is happily managing a woodland about 12 miles away.
Granny has moved back and forth between Wigtown and Italy but seems determined to settle in Galloway, where her eccentricities are appreciated in a way that they might not be in a more conventional place. Her eyesight has deteriorated at the same rate that her confidence has appreciated, and her sophisticated Italian appearance – once so alien to the townscape – has now been absorbed into the place to the point that she is part of the fabric. Her absence would now be as noted as her appearance once was.
Anna and I remain friends, and I hope we always will.
Captain has continued to increase in weight, but not intelligence, although he still charms customers on a daily basis.
* The Open Book was Anna’s idea. Realising she couldn’t be the only person who daydreamed about running their own bookshop, she persuaded my parents to buy a shop in the middle of Wigtown, which is run as an Airbnb which anyone can rent in order to experience running a bookshop for a week. It is booked solid for the next three years and attracts visitors from all over the world.
* FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) is a service Amazon provides where booksellers can store their stock in one of Amazon’s warehouses (euphemistically named ‘fulfilment centres’). When orders come in for the books, they will package and send them out to customers. Although it solves the problem of not having enough space for books in the shop – as with almost every service that Amazon provides to third-party sellers – it comes at a cost which always leaves you on the brink of wondering whether it is worthwhile. Inevitably their ‘charges’ will multiply and keep creeping up to the point at which your margin is so tight that it’s almost suffocating. But not quite. Parasites prefer to keep their hosts alive.
* Traditionally a bothy is a small cottage used to house farmworkers, but in recent years it has become more associated with renovated crofts in the mountains, used as refuges for climbers and hill walkers.
CONTENTS
January 2015
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Epilogue
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