The magistrate acquits Renton, but convicts Spud.
In any case, I deeply dislike security cameras and would rather lose the occasional book than have that sort of intrusive monitoring in the shop. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The smell of cat piss is back.
Till total £236
14 customers
MONDAY, 3 MARCH
Online orders: 9
Books found: 8
Another beautiful day, marred at an early stage by a customer wearing shorts and knee-length woollen socks who knocked over a pile of books and left them lying on the floor. Shortly afterwards, a whistling customer with a ponytail and what I can only assume was a hat he’d borrowed from a clown bought a copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I suspect deliberately to undermine my faith in humanity and dampen my spirits further.
A book we had sold on Amazon called Orient-Express: A Personal Journey, and which we had sent out three weeks ago, was returned today with a note from the customer that reads: ‘Unfortunately not as expected. Require a more pictorial version. Please exchange or refund.’ I suspect that the customer was treating us like an online library and had read the book.
Eliot arrived at 5 p.m. for a visit of as yet unknown duration. I’m fairly sure he has a Festival board meeting some time during the week, but he hasn’t told me yet.
Till total £90
4 customers
TUESDAY, 4 MARCH
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
The shop has a regular visitor who goes by the name of William, or Agnes, depending on whichever takes his or her fancy when he or she wakes up. As usual, he/she turned up with a bag of books to sell. William or Agnes is an octogenarian transgender man/woman from Irvine who drives a Reliant Robin. I’m not sure from which gender into which he/she has transitioned, hence the he/she thing here. He/she had massive hooped ear-rings on and was quite excited about the books he/she had brought in, which were, as always, rubbish. Gave him/her £4 for them. He/she spent some time complaining about the complexities of the benefits system, ending his/her rant with ‘I am a very busy man-stroke-woman.’
Since being awarded the Book Town status, Wigtown has attracted increasing numbers of people who come here to sell books as well as to buy them. The concept of a Book Town originated with Richard Booth in the 1970s. He convinced booksellers to move to the Welsh Marches town of Hay-on-Wye, testing the theory that a town full of bookshops would encourage people to visit, and the economy could be re-invigorated. It worked, and the concept eventually arrived in Scotland. Wigtown’s Book Town project was launched in 1998. Although it was initially met with suspicion by many locals, it has changed the place for the better, and the town, in line with its motto, is flourishing once again. When I moved back here from Bristol in 2001, I recall reading a letter in the Galloway Gazette in which the correspondent – complaining that she could no longer buy a pair of socks in Wigtown – blamed the bookshops for this travesty. That resentment is all but gone now, and it would take a brave person to argue that the Book Town project hasn’t improved the lot of the town immeasurably. It’s not even possible to buy socks in the nearby market town of Newton Stewart these days. That woman must be incandescent by now.
Bev dropped off a box of the mugs onto which she’s printed the cover of Gay Agony.
Till total £57
5 customers
WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
An Australian customer paid for a £1.50 book in small change but clearly had no idea what each coin was and took about five minutes to work it out. At one point he asked, ‘What do you use these 1p and 2p coins for?’
Anna telephoned at 3 p.m. and we reminisced about a famous instance of her linguistic impressionism: the time her friend Sarah was visiting from America and we went to Glentrool in the Galloway Hills. Glentrool, apart from being a beautiful mountainous region, cut through by tumbling burns and dotted with lochs, was the site of an important battle in 1307 that marked the start of Robert the Bruce’s campaign against the English dominion of Scotland, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. When we were walking to a waterfall there with Sarah, Anna explained to her that ‘Glentrool was where Robert the Burns took his last stand.’ And thus, in one short sentence, managed to confuse Robert the Bruce, Robert Burns and General Custer, and to rewrite the outcome of a critical battle in Scottish history.
Till total £70.49
11 customers
THURSDAY, 6 MARCH
Online orders: 7
Books found: 7
In the morning I unloaded the boxes of books about golf that I picked up from Callum’s on Saturday. I’ve tried to sell them on eBay as a job lot twice, but with no luck, so I will probably put them into the auction in Dumfries once I have checked whether there’s anything in there that’s worth listing online. Nicky can check that this weekend. The warehouse is starting to look a bit messy.
A customer wearing a huge chunky gold cross on a chain asked, ‘Do you have a section for old Bibles and church things?’ I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by ‘church things’, so I pointed him at the theology section. We do have some beautiful and very cheap old Bibles, but the people who ask for them never, ever buy them. He managed to find an unpriced miniature Bible from 1870 and asked me what the price would be. I told him £4. He didn’t buy it. There must be some kind of psychological effect created by finding an unpriced book. Whatever price you suggest when asked, however low, seems to be more than the customer is prepared to pay. I have lost count of the number of times people have brought books to the counter that we have yet to price up and said, ‘This one’s got no price on it. It must be free.’ It wasn’t funny the first time, and fourteen years later it has completely lost the sheen it never had in the first place.
Just before closing time a woman with a strong Yorkshire accent bought a cookbook and told me, ‘You’re not from round here.’ I replied that I was brought up here. Again, I have heard this so often that it is slowly driving me insane. She told me that my accent has a ‘strange twang’.
Till total £47
3 customers
FRIDAY, 7 MARCH
Online orders: 4
Books found: 4
When I came downstairs from breakfast to open the shop, I discovered that Nicky had already arrived and switched everything on. She greeted me with her usual melodic ‘Helloooo!’ before scampering upstairs to put whatever horrors she had raided from the Morrisons skip last night into the fridge.
Eliot left at 2 p.m., leaving a pair of shoes behind, each shoe in a different room.
This morning, as I was working my way through a couple of bags of books, I found a shopping list in one of them. The handwriting looked very like Nicky’s. Among the things on the list were ‘Hair Gunk’, ‘Leg Razors’ and ‘Witch Face Wash’. When I asked Nicky about the shopping list, she denied all knowledge, telling me that she doesn’t shave her legs during winter and offering to show me as evidence.
At 2 p.m. I left the shop and drove to Dumfries to catch the London train and visit Anna in Hampstead for the weekend. I left Nicky with the thirty boxes of books about golf to check and list on Fulfilled By Amazon. She complained bitterly about it again, but reluctantly agreed to do it.
Read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner on the journey south, an extraordinarily modern book considering it was written in 1824.
Till total £90.50