The Diary of a Bookseller

SATURDAY, 3 JANUARY

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky opened the shop at 10 a.m. She was up and about and clearly not feeling the best, but not bad enough to stop her from hijacking the shop’s Facebook page and posting the following message:

Good People of 2014

1. The Ivy Leaf chippy (Stranraer) – kept a fiver for me when I dropped it; the best & most honest in Scotland.

2. Customer who ordered a book in March 2014, we found it 2 weeks ago, did he still want it? ‘yes please’ & paid MORE than we asked.

3. Customer on hearing the price of a ring was £3.50, yells ‘HOW MUCH?’ – it IS silver, we reassure her – ‘I expected it to be at least £35.00.’

Heartwarming!

Anna and I drove to the farmhouse near Newton Stewart to pick up the 2,000 books. It was a glorious day, and the house and farm buildings were ancient and beautiful. The books were in the spare bedroom of the dairy cottage. While we were chatting to Ewan, it transpired that his American girlfriend was being forced to leave by the immigration authorities in an uncannily similar version of Anna’s story. Anna had been deported for unwittingly entering the country more times than was permitted without a resident’s visa back in 2010. It took a Herculean effort and a significant amount of money before she was allowed back into Scotland – a country that needs all the well-educated, intelligent, hard-working people who want to live here that we can take in. Odd, also, that he is called Ewan, the name I chose for myself in Anna’s book. When we were loading the books into the van, it emerged that the people who live in the dairy cottage are Ewan’s brother Will and his girlfriend Emma. Emma worked in the shop for a summer about five years ago and is now a doctor in Dumfries.

The books were boxed, so, rather than go through them, I took them away and we agreed that I would sort through them later. It took two trips in the van to shift them, but thankfully there were a few of us so it didn’t take too long.

There was a piece in today’s Guardian about living in Wigtown called ‘Let’s move to Wigtown and the Machars peninsula’. It was subtitled ‘A little backwater, in the best sense of the word’ and included in the text was the following sentence: ‘There is always a friendly welcome wherever you go.’ The shop’s Facebook page was bombarded by comments like ‘They clearly haven’t been in your shop’ and ‘Obviously they haven’t met you.’

Anna and I took down the Christmas decorations in the shop after we had unloaded the boxes of books from the van. Hardly a great ordeal, considering how pathetic my efforts to celebrate Christmas were. Being Jewish, Anna was probably the only person in Wigtown less interested in Christmas than I was. Apart from Nicky.

Till total £63.98

12 customers