The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 12 JUNE

Online orders: 6

Books found: 5

Laurie was in the shop again. Today was a beautiful sunny day, and Anna was clearly delighted to be back in Galloway and away from London.

My father telephoned shortly after the shop opened to see if I wanted to go fishing, so much of the morning was spent with him in a boat, trout-fishing on Elrig Loch. We caught six or seven wild brown trout. Elrig is a loch about six miles from Wigtown. Gavin Maxwell spent his childhood nearby and wrote about it in The House of Elrig. The house is now owned by a family called Korner, who left Europe in the 1930s, when the Nazi menace was starting to loom large. They took in the Austrian ‘degenerate’ artist Oskar Kokoschka during the Second World War, after he fled Europe in 1938. Stories abound locally of Kokoschka giving framed sketches to local farmers and other people who had shown him kindness, and of the recipients – unable to comprehend the artist’s modern genius – politely accepting them, then throwing the sketches in the waste-paper basket and putting photographs in the frames instead.

My father and I often fish together, and drifting down the banks of Elrig on a warm day, with a good ripple on the water, is nirvana. When there is enough water, we go salmon-fishing on the nearby River Luce, a river that I have fished since early childhood with him. During the season we both become acutely aware of the weather: if it is warm enough to go to Elrig and there is a bit of cloud cover (not too bright) and a good enough breeze, we will meet at the boathouse and fish for trout. If there has been enough rain to push the Luce up over a foot, we will meet on the banks of the river instead and fish for salmon. The river always takes precedence over the loch if conditions are right for both.

My father first took me fishing when I was two, and that is the age at which I caught my first trout. No doubt, with hindsight, it was my father who caught it, but I reeled it in, and in that moment, like the trout, I was hooked. When I was a small child – four or five years old – I would insist on going to the river with him. As a passionate salmon fisherman, he didn’t want the distraction of a boy pestering him. So he gave me an old, broken trout rod which had belonged to his father, and tied a length of baler twine around a tree, then paced out a short distance from the water’s edge and tied the other end around my belt. This allowed him to fish every pool down, close enough to know that I was safe, and for me to flail the rod around pointlessly – but utterly convinced I would catch something – without any chance of falling into the water.

Arrived back at the shop after lunch to find that the best sale of the day was the Georgian mahogany chest commode. I bought it about ten years ago for £80 at the auction in Dumfries, and used it as a glorified plant pot for a Boston fern that lived in the drawing room for most of that time. Eventually I decided to get rid of it. I can’t remember why. Perhaps I bought something that looked less like a loo for my Boston fern. We sold it for £200 to a charming woman who was delighted with it. Nicky, who mocked me relentlessly about it and was convinced it would never sell, will be furious to be proved wrong.

Till total £342.49

15 customers