At the start of the day I set up the GoPro camera behind the counter to make speeded-up video of life in the shop, just as Dylan Moran came in. I now have video of him buying a book from the shop. Flo served him. She was annoyingly unflapped about it.
Flo overheard a woman ask a man, as they walked through the shop, ‘So they didn’t have the book you’re looking for?’ To which he replied, shaking his head, ‘Aye, they did, but just the one copy.’
Ceilidh in the big marquee in the square in the evening. It was packed. Lots of girls dancing with girls and boys with boys, as well as the more traditional arrangements. In the early days of the festival nothing was particularly well attended, but the ceilidh was undoubtedly among the worst. For the first few years there were just a handful of us, and to avoid embarrassment we would all end up joining in every single dance. Now it is different. The event has to be ticketed and always sells out. It has become enormously popular. At one point I was standing next to Damian Barr, who was dancing with another man. I drunkenly asked him which of them was being the woman, then later discovered that he is gay. If he was offended, he hid it extremely well. Faux pas of the festival so far. Went to the house to try to convince Nicky (who had decided not to attend) to change her mind and come along. Bumped into Jen Campbell and her parents outside the shop, so they came in for a drink and a chat.
We all stayed up late: Colin, Peggy, Stuart, Nicky and Natalie Haynes, who was on the Booker panel of judges with Stuart. Peggy runs the Dundee Literary Festival and could easily have emerged from the same clutch of eggs as Stuart Kelly. Colin, her partner – who generally answers to the name of ‘Beard’ – is running the social media side of the festival. They are both Wigtown Festival institutions, and have helped carve the identity of the event as much as Eliot, Stuart, Twigger and Finn.
The shop was heaving all day: the last gasp before the long winter of penury.
Till total £1,274.03
87 customers
SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
Nicky and Flo in. I bumped into Nicky in the kitchen at about 8.30 a.m. She told me, ‘You smell as good as a bacon roll.’
As always on the final day of the festival, there’s a sense of end-of-holiday blues, as the party begins to wind down. Despite it being the last day, there was the usual chaos going on in the Writers’ Retreat, with the staff and Maria being magnificently serene.
Eliot roped Anna into chairing Jen Campbell’s event, a talk about her new book, The Bookshop Book. It went extremely well, apart from me asking a particularly stupid question. Both Anna and Jen were erudite and entertaining.
As with every year, on the last day of the festival, we turned the Writers’ Retreat into a cinema. This year we set up the projector and watched Dr Who with Stuart, Beth and Cheyney.
Till total £568.75
32 customers
MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER
Online orders: 5
Books found: 4
Nicky and Flo in. We spent the day shifting furniture and trying to get the place back to normal. Maria came in at lunchtime to sort out her stuff in the kitchen. Anna and I drove to the dump to get rid of cardboard boxes and empty wine bottles.
Nicky made herself cheese on toast for lunch and ate it in the middle of the shop, surrounded by customers.
This morning a busybody of an old man for whom I have always had an intense dislike came into the shop to try to persuade me to stock the self-published novel he has written. I am frequently presented with this sort of thing, and I take it on sale or return for purely diplomatic reasons. Without exception, one year later, I end up returning every single copy.
The big marquee came down today, leaving a pale yellow patch of grass beneath where it had stood, a reminder throughout the long winter of what had been here until it starts to green up again as the soil temperature warms up in March.
Anna and I went for supper at The Ploughman with the volunteers.
Till total £123.97
14 customers
TUESDAY, 7 OCTOBER
Online orders: 5
Books found: 3
Nicky was in today.
The shop received an anonymous postcard this morning, so I posted it on Facebook. Hopefully it will trigger more. It was a picture of a bronze lion, and on the back it just read: ‘a large portion of the Oxford English Dictionary was written by a murderer from a mental institution’.
After lunch I dismantled the framework I had put up for Allison’s event in the old warehouse. Everyone had a slight case of post-festival come-down today.
We spent most of the day continuing the clear-up operation. After the shop was shut I cooked for the interns and we watched Wings of Desire on the projector in the Writers’ Retreat.
The timing of the festival was originally intended to prolong the tourist season for shops in the town and it has succeeded to such an extent that the infrastructure is starting to creak with Hotels and B&Bs nearing the capacity they experience at the summer peak. The extent to which it brings people and money to the town more than justifies the costs of putting it on.
I rarely have the luxury of attending any events, and spend my time driving to the dump and the recycling skips with bin bags and bottles from the Writers’ Retreat; but when I am in the shop, I have the opportunity to meet writers and other famous (or not) visitors in the Retreat, where they tend to be far more relaxed than at their events, so it is an extraordinary privilege to have the chance to talk to them in a more natural environment.
Eliot is excellent at making a point of introducing me to people although if he’s not around, occasionally – seeing me help clearing up plates, or filling up the log basket – they will assume that I am hired help, and a few behave disparagingly.
One year, as I was putting logs on the fire, a well-known newspaper columnist who was sitting at the table in the Retreat drinking free wine and eating free lobster, clicked his fingers and shouted ‘sugar’ at me, while pointing at an empty sugar bowl on the table.
Those are the visitors whom I dislike second-most. Worse than them, though, are those who – once they find out that it is my house – suddenly start to treat me differently from the girls helping Maria in the kitchen or the Retreat, or Nicky and Flo, or Bethan in the shop. I suppose the charge could be fairly levelled at me that I don’t make a great deal of effort to find out about my customers, but I am never rude to waiters, waitresses, cleaners or shop staff and hope that I have never treated anyone as a second-class citizen, and instead merely reflect rudeness back at people who are rude to me. I can afford to be rude back to customers – it’s my shop, nobody is going to fire me – but most people who work in shops are not in this position, and to exploit that by not showing them the slightest courtesy is something that offends me greatly. And while I do make observations about the appearance of some of my customers, they are just observations – not judgements. In most cases.
Till total £143.90
14 customers
WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 4
Just before lunch a customer offered £10 for a book that we have priced at £80. I told him that if he asked politely he could have £10 off. He slammed the book down on the counter and walked out in ‘disgust’, at which point I decided that escapism from customers was the order of the day, and found a new book to read and hid in the office with Kidnapped – a fate I would quite happily have seen befall that last customer.