Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Left Aberdeenshire at just after 1 p.m. and headed south. Home by 6 p.m.

Till total £196.98

19 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 4

Nicky was in the shop today, a glorious sunny day. I’m off for a few days’ fishing next week, so we discussed the various jobs that need to be done in my absence. I have little or no confidence that she absorbed any of the information and expect that she will do exactly as she pleases while I am away.

As Nicky was leaving, someone on a mobility scooter almost ran her down on the pavement. Initially I thought it might have been Andy, who bought hers a few weeks ago. As I was musing at the irony of her being run over by her own mobility scooter, she came back into the shop to collect her hat, which she had left in a corner somewhere. I asked her if she had seen Andy lately, as I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. She replied with the casual indifference that is the preserve of those who believe that death is the beginning rather than the end, ‘He died last week.’

Till total £336.87

25 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Drove up to Lairg for three days’ fishing with friends Frederick and Fenella and the other guests they’d invited. The A9 is a tortuous road, particularly when you are on your own, as there is no radio signal for much of it. Normally, I can re-tune to long wave and listen to Test Match Special , but England beat India with a day to spare yesterday, so I was denied even that to keep me company. It rained heavily all the way, and the forecast is for more of the same all week. Ideally for salmon-fishing a falling river is best, but it looks very much like this is not going to be likely.

This trip is a highlight of my year, and I live in perpetual fear of not being invited again – probably for my inadequate fishing (and social) skills. Frederick’s family shares the fishing rights for the River Shin and the Oykel with a number of other people, and they own a considerably extended cottage just outside Lairg. Every year for the past few years it has been my good fortune to have been invited to fish for a few days on some of the best salmon water in Scotland. By now I know most of the other people who are also invited – it changes every year – and this time, as well as Frederick’s children from his first marriage, Wilf and Daisy, the guests include Biffy, with whom I was at school for a few years, and Will, a charming man whom I hadn’t met before.

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.

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

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

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

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

Online orders: 3