The Shin is a spectacular river; Mohamed Al-Fayed built a visitor centre near the Falls of Shin, where there is a platform from which anyone can stand and watch the salmon waiting in the falls pool burst out of the water and power up through the waterfall into the upper section of the river to spawn. The Shin is part of a hydro system, and cuts a deep and steep gorge through a beautiful broad-leafed landscape, dropping dramatically down into the Kyle of Sutherland. There is a sense of something truly ancient about the Shin – perhaps it’s a connection to the Ice Age – huge boulders the size of houses are strewn along its path – or some form of geological transformation that you can’t help but feel a part of, because the river is still carving and ploughing its way along the Silurian fault-line in the Moine Nappe to the sea. The upper waters of the Oykel have a similar appearance, but there the landscape is more open: the Shin is enclosed by high cliffs, trapped in the gorge and, as I discovered one year, at the mercy of the hydro scheme. I was kneeling on a rock in the middle of the river when a hydro technician must have decided to open the sluice. I was concentrating on trying to cover the water with my fly, so that I failed to notice that the rock on which I was kneeling had become submersed. By the time I was aware, the river between the rock and the bank had risen to such a level that the only way I could get back was to flood my waders and stagger, soaked, to the trees and the path home.
MONDAY, 11 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 3
The sound of howling wind and driving rain woke me at 7 a.m. Frederick and I drove from the cottage down to the Shin to meet up with the ghillies. The Shin was unfishable at 5 feet, as was the Oykel at 11 feet. Far too much water to fish either, so we went to the falls of both rivers to see what they looked like with so vast a volume of water crashing through them.
Till total £467.46
45 customers
TUESDAY, 12 AUGUST
Online orders: 4
Books found: 2
Up at 7.30 a.m. with Will, one of the other guests – an old friend of Frederick. We drove to beat 3 on the Oykel, where the water was very high. I caught an 18lb. salmon at about 9 a.m., just as Peter, one of the ghillies, arrived. It turned out to be the only fish caught on the Oykel that day. In the afternoon I fished the Shin and lost a huge salmon above the falls, which took all of the line off my reel in a matter of seconds and kept going, leaving a ‘V’ in its wake. I am convinced that it must have been over 30lb. I doubt whether anyone believed me when I told them.
Till total £534.57
54 customers
WEDNESDAY, 13 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Spent the morning fishing. After lunch I said goodbye and left for Glasgow, where I spent the night in a hotel, and where I have a book deal nearby tomorrow morning.
Till total £297.70
25 customers
THURSDAY, 14 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 3
Awoke at 8 a.m. and drove to a house in Glasgow to meet a young couple who are moving house and have decided to sell their book collection. It included an assortment of mountaineering books, and I picked out three boxes’ worth and offered them £75. As I was writing the cheque on the desk in their office, I accidentally nudged the mouse next to the monitor, which activated the previously dormant screen. It brought up a swingers’ web site on which there was a photograph of a very attractive young dark-haired woman. Thankfully, neither of them was in the room at the time, and when the wife reappeared to take the cheque, the screensaver had returned.
After I had loaded the boxes into the van, I drove home and arrived back at the shop by 12.30 p.m. to find both Laurie and Katie chatting and listening to music instead of working. The counter was a mess, the tables and workspace all littered with books and scraps of paper, so I attempted to give them a lecture about tidiness, to which they responded by calling me a fussy old woman and imitating me, so I checked the river levels online and decided to go to the nearby River Minnoch for the afternoon and try to catch another salmon, an enterprise that proved entirely unsuccessful.
At 4.30 p.m. I returned to the shop to discover my mother giving my cousin Giles a guided tour of the place. She is partial to giving people guided tours of my house. Once, a few years ago, during the book festival, I went to my bedroom to fetch a jumper and found her in there with a very uncomfortable-looking Joan Bakewell, whom she was lecturing on the subject of my tastes in interior design.
An elderly man came in just before 5 p.m. and asked if we could clear books from his late sister’s house near Haugh of Urr (roughly 800 titles). He needs to clear them urgently as he is only here until Saturday, so I have agreed to go over and look at them tomorrow after lunch.
Till total £299.69
32 customers
FRIDAY, 15 AUGUST
Online orders: 3
Books found: 0
Katie was in today, covering for Nicky.
Monsoon was down again, so we couldn’t access the locator codes to find the books that have been ordered, the title of one of which was He Was Born Gay, by Emlyn Williams.
After lunch I left for Haugh of Urr, a tiny village about thirty-five miles away, to look at a book collection. They were in a very pretty, small whitewashed cottage. The place was a mess, but full of beautiful antique furniture and paintings, and a mixed collection of books. There wasn’t much exceptional material, and a lot of the better books were mouldy and water-damaged from a flood in March, but I found a copy of Don Quixote from 1755 in two volumes and some A. A. Milne firsts. The books, paintings and furniture had come from a stately home, and had been divided among the family when the bigger house was sold. They looked out of place in the tiny cottage and had clearly been bought with a far grander location in mind. The old man was there with his grandson, and said very little. I noticed that I had the same trainers as his grandson, and when I pointed this out to him, he looked horrified. Left with twelve boxes of books and wrote the old man a cheque for £525.
I returned to the shop to find a list of things to do left by Katie before she went home, including ‘Fix Monsoon’. This is becoming far too frequent a problem, and it is probably time to look into an alternative system. It is now inoperable about 25 per cent of the time, and although the tech support is good, they are based in Oregon and so are eight hours behind us. Conveniently, they start work as I am closing up.
Till total £217.98
26 customers
SATURDAY, 16 AUGUST
Online orders: 5
Books found: 0
On my own in the shop all day, and Monsoon was still down this morning, which means that we can’t even find locator codes for the books that have been ordered overnight. Nicky was at the Edinburgh Book Festival, dispensing Random Book Club flyers and wisdom in equal measure. I received a text message from her at 4 p.m. to say that she had given up and gone to the pub.
By lunchtime I had already had a disagreement with a customer about whether or not ghosts exist, and another who had brought in a carefully bubble-wrapped odd volume of Burns (one from a set of four – the other three were absent) from 1840, believing it to be worth a fortune. She looked quite insulted when I told her that I wouldn’t even take it if she offered it to me for free. Odd volumes are difficult to sell – the chances of finding a buyer who is missing the volume you have, and in a matching binding, are extremely low, so unless it is something exceptional, or an illustrated book with fine woodcuts or copperplate engravings, we – and most book dealers – tend to avoid them.