SATURDAY, 1 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 6
Nicky stayed overnight and opened the shop this morning. When I asked her which was the winning postcard from the competition, she pointed to one that she had obviously written herself. It even had our Royal Mail stamp on it:
‘Cinderella!’ roared the wicked step-mother, splattering the customers in saliva and red hairs, ‘WHY is the stove lit and WHY are those 40 boxes of mouldy books neatly stacked and WHY have you dealt with all the orders efficiently?’ ‘You drive me INSANE! Go and water down the soup and spoon feed cream to the cat.’ ‘AND WHY is all this money in the till?’ ‘No more mouldy trifle for you, wretch.’
I’ve decided to read Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father, John McNeillie, who wrote The Wigtown Ploughman, a novel published in 1939 whose depiction of the crude standards of sanitation and hygiene in rural Scotland revolutionised social welfare in the country. Andrew and I have been friends since I bought the shop, and I’m curious to see how he writes, and to see what use he made of a letter that his father wrote to one of his readers that I found in a book and gave to him as part of his research material.
Till total £233
15 customers
MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 7
Books found: 7
Five orders from AbeBooks, two from Amazon.
One postcard in the mail today: ‘The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.’ It had a local postmark. Kate the postie dropped off a ticket from Royal Mail telling me that there is an item for which no postage had been paid. It is in the sorting office in Newton Stewart. I will collect it tomorrow.
Callum came in to rebuild the counter area. We are going to incorporate an oak gantry that I bought at a farm sale on the Buccleuch estate about ten years ago. It is intended to form a more substantial barrier to protect me from customers.
A man in his thirties with a luxuriant beard came in and asked if we would be interested in 2,000 books he has in a farmhouse outside Newton Stewart. I said that we would; he will be in touch soon. Just as he left, another customer asked, ‘Do you have a toilet in here?’ I told him that we don’t, but that there’s one in the town hall, just at the end of the square. Customer: ‘Oh, that’s very disappointing. And it’s raining outside.’
Till total £238
15 customers
TUESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 6
Books found: 5
Callum came in again at 9 a.m. to continue with fitting the gantry. He had to dismantle some of yesterday’s work to get the plaster-board in.
Eliot arrived at 9 p.m. for a board meeting later this week. I lit the fire, which he sat in front of, complaining about how cold it was. Presumably that’s the reason he didn’t kick his shoes off the moment he arrived in the kitchen, as he normally does.
Till total £82.50
8 customers
WEDNESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 2
Books found: 1
Awoke at 6.30 a.m. to the sound of doors slamming and stomping feet, then I remembered that Eliot is staying, so went back to sleep. Finally got up at 8.30 a.m. to brush my teeth, to find that Eliot was having a bath, so I went downstairs to make some breakfast. His clothes were all over the kitchen floor. I made a cup of tea and went into the big room to find the evidence of his breakfast all over the table – plates, mugs, cutlery, crumbs. He had also managed to shut the cat in there. He doesn’t consciously do these things, and I am quite sure it is because his mind is awash with the information that he will have to present to the board at the meeting.
This afternoon Mrs Phillips telephoned (‘I am ninety-three and blind’), looking for a copy of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. We had a copy in stock. Helen Macdonald was one of the speakers at this year’s festival, and hers was one of the most popular events.
Callum was in after lunch to continue work on the counter. As he was underneath it, he was startled by a voice saying ‘Hello’ and – temporarily distracted – let go of the hammer at a vital moment, sending it crashing through a pane of glass. The guilty party was Mr Deacon, who was in to order a copy of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate – ‘Not for me, that sort of thing. Present for my daughter. Don’t read fiction. It’s largely written for women.’ We had a copy on the shelf, so I didn’t have to order it for him.
Very quiet in the shop. Not a single customer after 11.45 a.m., apart from Mr Deacon. The day was saved by an online order for the two-volume set of Don Quixote I bought on 15 August from the cottage in Haugh of Urr. It made £400 and sold to a customer in Japan.
Till total £152.50
5 customers
THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3
Books found: 2
No postcards today.
Nicky has asked if she can have my Facebook password so that she can update the thousand or so people who follow the status updates from her perspective. She has also told me that there is a bit of the new counter area that Callum has built that she doesn’t like and she’s going to remove it the next time I’m away. As always, there was a complete absence of any rational explanation as to why she has taken exception to that particular bit of the counter: ‘I just dinnae like it.’
The winner of last week’s anonymous postcard competition (the prize is a book of their choice, value up to £20) was from London, and the card read: ‘“Do you know Yeats? The wine lodge? No, W. B. Yeats, the poet…” and so to assonance, getting the rhyme wrong.’ Apparently it is a quotation from Willy Russell, who came to the book festival a few years ago.
Isabel came in to do the accounts. She was very taken with the new book spirals.
I reached the point in Andrew McNeillie’s biography of his father in which he quotes from the letter I gave him. My surname is often spelled incorrectly, but Andrew’s interpretation of it is very unusuaclass="underline" ‘Bithyll’.
Till total £88
5 customers
FRIDAY, 7 NOVEMBER
Online orders: 3