In the early afternoon an elderly man telephoned. He had found a book we are selling online for £3 and wanted to buy it directly. Due to his bad hearing and a lot of confusion, the whole process took half an hour. While he was on the telephone the postman appeared and removed the five bags of random books.
Bum Bag Dave was still shuffling about with his various beeping devices at 5.15 p.m. and asked if we have a section on pets. I told him, yes, but we were closed. At 5.25 p.m. he was still wandering about the shop, muttering about lawyers ripping him off.
Till total £107.49
14 customers
FRIDAY, 21 MARCH
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Nicky was back in working today. We had the usual argument about her making a mess and putting books on the wrong shelves. She threatened to quit, which she usually does about once a month.
At lunchtime I left for Samye Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist retreat in Eskdalemuir. En route I picked up Anna from Dumfries railway station for a break from her London life.
Samye Ling has been considerably enlarged since I last visited twenty years ago, and is a spectacular incongruity in the bleak Scottish moorland, speckled with golden Buddhas, pagodas and colourful temples and buildings, as well as a smattering of semi-derelict Portakabins and other relics of the centre’s infancy. We found the library, and met Maggy, the librarian – a woman in her sixties in a wheelchair.
The library is new and is a massive unshelved room with piles of books on the floor. I went through the stock they want to dispose of and offered her £150. She clearly expected more, but when I told her that I was quite happy to leave them so that they could ask someone else in to look at them, there was a chorus of ‘No!’ from the other volunteers working there, so I had to take all the rubbish too, but there was some reasonable stock among it – a general mix of fiction and non-fiction, the sort of thing you’d normally find in someone’s house rather than what you might expect from the library of a Tibetan monastery. No doubt they have taken out all the material that would be appropriate for them to keep in their collection.
Anna was completely smitten with Samye Ling – the contrast between the landscape and the architecture, even between different parts of the place, some of which looked genuinely oriental while others looked as though they might have been built by the council shortly after the end of the Second World War.
We drove back to Wigtown and Anna’s demeanour relaxed as we grew closer to the shop. Her first instinct when she enters the shop is to find Captain, the cat, and within moments they were happily reunited.
The transformer on one of the lights in the Scottish room has blown. I am sick of changing light bulbs on those strings of lights, so bought three used French brass chandeliers from eBay.
Isabel came in to do the accounts. She and her husband have a farm near Newton Stewart, and Isabel is proficient in the accounting package SAGE. She has agreed to organise my accounts for me, thus relieving me of the most dreaded task of the week. She normally comes on Wednesday, but one of her daughters was performing in a concert this week, so she postponed. Her parting words today were ‘You’ve got lots of money in your account.’ Nobody has ever used those words in that order when speaking to me before.
Till total £122
11 customers
SATURDAY, 22 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
The sun shone all day, and it was warm enough to open the front door. Nicky arrived at her customary hour (fifteen minutes late), and we started to unload the boxes of books from Samye Ling. Nicky has found a company called Cash for Clothes, which pays £50 a ton for used books. She booked them to collect from the shop on Wednesday so we should be able to dispose of much of the rubbish from the Samye Ling deal.
A few weeks ago a woman bought a copy of Where No Man Cries, by Emma Blair. She told me, to my surprise, that Blair was not in fact a woman, but was a 6-foot 3-inch beer-drinking, chain-smoking Glaswegian man called Iain Blair who had only achieved success with his romantic novels when he gave himself a female nom de plume. Blair’s books have been among the most borrowed books from Scottish libraries in the past twenty years. Before becoming a writer, Blair had been an actor. Apparently his career ended abruptly when, after being called to audition for a part in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he was kept waiting for so long that when Steven Spielberg eventually came into the room and said ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’ he replied, ‘No, I fucking cannot.’ He died in 2011.
The chandeliers arrived just as Norrie was in the shop to collect some paint that had been delivered here by mistake. He offered to take them away and get them working again, as they have seen better days.
Till total £160.38
17 customers
MONDAY, 24 MARCH
Online orders: 8
Books found: 5
Just as I was returning from the kitchen with my cup of tea, a customer with polyester trousers about six inches too short and a donkey jacket almost knocked it out of my hand and asked, ‘Have you ever had a death in here? Has anyone ever died falling off a stepladder in the shop?’ I told him, ‘Not yet, but I was hoping today might be my lucky day.’
In the emails today was one from a former employee, Sara, who worked for me during school holidays a few years ago: ‘Yo Bitch-tits, I need a reference. Here’s the form attached. Make it good, you bastard or I will come and get you.’ So I wrote this and emailed it to her.
Tel. 01988 402499 www.the-bookshop.com
17 North Main Street, Wigtown DG8 9HL
Monday, March 24, 2014
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
REFERENCE FOR SARA PEARCE
Sara worked Saturdays at The Book Shop, 17 North Main Street, Wigtown, for three years while she was at the Douglas Ewart High School. When I say ‘worked’, I use the word in its loosest possible terms. She spent the entire day either standing outside the shop, smoking and snarling at people trying to enter the building, or watching repeats of Hollyoaks on 4OD. Although she was generally punctual, she often arrived either drunk or severely hungover. She was usually rude and aggressive. She rarely did as she was told, and never, in the entire three years of her time here, did anything constructive without having to be told to do so. She invariably left a trail of rubbish behind her, usually consisting of Irn-Bru bottles, crisp packets, chocolate wrappers and cigarette packets. She consistently stole lighters and matches from the business, and was offensive and frequently violent towards me.
She was a valued member of staff and I have no hesitation in recommending her.
Till total £109.39
12 customers
TUESDAY, 25 MARCH
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Two of today’s orders were for 1960s bus timetables for the north of England.
Andrew, the volunteer with Asperger’s, turned up at 11 a.m. He was accompanied by the woman from the council, who came with him to make sure that he arrived safely and everything was in order. She suggested that I put him in charge of arranging the crime section into alphabetical order. By noon he had reached the Bs; then he went home.
Shortly after Andrew had left, an extremely rude old woman demanded a copy of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin. We had one in the Russia section, which she brought to the counter. It was an unusually pristine copy in a mint jacket, clearly unread – original price £25. She asked how much it was; I pointed to the sticker that says £6.50. She pushed it away from her and turned, walking out muttering, ‘Too expensive.’ I’m pretty sure she’ll be back, so I re-priced it at £8.50.