Шон Байтелл - The Diary of a Bookseller

Made a determined effort to plough through And the Ass Saw the Angel and finish it before the festival begins. Just thirty pages to go.

Till total £146.49

9 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 3

Nicky and Bethan were both in today.

The actors (Zoe and Darren) rehearsing in the shop caused even more consternation among the customers, particularly now that they have found props and costumes.

Amazon telephoned to say that they have tracked down the missing shipment, and it is now listed and available online.

The actors, Anna and I went round to the house that Eliot has rented for the festival, and he cooked supper for us and the interns, Cheyney and Beth. When we got home, Nicky offered me the last bit of the chocolate caterpillar cake that she had bought for 49p. All that was left was its face; she had eaten the rest of it.

Carol-Ann arrived. Stuart Kelly arrived too, so the house is fairly full. The two Italians who are staying in the festival bed should arrive some time tomorrow, so I went into Newton Stewart to have spare keys cut so that guests can come and go as they please.

After work I spent a frantic hour or two putting an audio piece together for Stuart McLean for ‘The Dark Outside’ event, which starts at noon on Saturday.

The festival begins tomorrow.

Till total £227.49

15 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 3

I finished And the Ass Saw the Angel before the shop opened. Nicky and Bethan were both in again today.

Maria, who is catering for the Writers’ Retreat this year, came to set up the kitchen. This seemed mainly to involve the pair of us moving fridges around.

Nicky and I spent the morning organising things for the festival, such as making sure we have enough loo roll and washing-up liquid and that sort of thing, as well as putting up signs directing people to venues and finding seating for events. The parquet tiles arrived for Allison’s stage. Laurie, Nicky and I had our annual argument about where the apostrophe belongs on the sign for the Writers’ Retreat.

Anna was uptight today, as the performances she has been rehearsing with the actors begin tomorrow. Apparently this is ‘immersive theatre’.

Received an email from the Italians who were supposed to be in the festival bed to say that they can’t make it. I suppose the silver lining is that it is now available for any friends who need a bed for the night.

The festival was launched (as always) with fireworks at 8 p.m. Nicky brought some home brew in with her and had a couple of pints of it before we headed down. Nobody else dared to touch the stuff. She was dancing away to the Creetown pipe band as though it was hardcore 1980s acid house.

After the fireworks we dutifully trooped to the festival opening night party in the marquee. Zoe read one of Alastair Reid’s poems after Eliot had welcomed everyone, then Lauren McQuistin performed a setting of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’.

Till total £346.75

30 customers

Online orders: 3

Books found: 2

Nicky was in, but Bethan took the weekend off to chop logs for the winter.

I opened the shop at 9 a.m. to find an author waiting outside. Before I had even put the lights on, he was in the door and demanding food, so Nicky told him that the Writers’ Retreat isn’t open until 10 a.m. Maria hadn’t even arrived with the food.

I found two of today’s orders and took the mail bags to the post office. William’s choler rises to an extraordinary level during the festival, and he complains bitterly that – despite the thousands of people who come to the town because of it – his newspaper sales drop. This he attributes to the fact that it is difficult to find somewhere to park, so that locals go elsewhere to buy their newspapers.

Nicky decided that today – traditionally the busiest day of the festival – would be a good day to paint the shop windows and spent most of the morning doing that while I dealt with customers and the chaos of the first day of the Writers’ Retreat. This normally involves me searching for extension cables for the soup kettle, fuses to repair it when it has blown immediately after it has been plugged in, unblocking the sink, filling log baskets and lighting fires.

As well as all of that, Anna asked me if I could film her theatre performances in various bookshops throughout the town. They appeared to meet with an equal measure of confusion and excitement from customers wherever they were performed. One bookseller found the whole thing so perplexing that he telephoned me and said that that they were not welcome back in his shop.

Lou and Scott, my sister and brother-in-law, and their children arrived in the morning. They are loyal supporters of the book festival and always come down for Wigtown’s Got Talent, an event that happens on the first Saturday night of the festival. I fed them in the Writers’ Retreat at lunchtime, during which we heard a fairly harrowing story about necrophilia from a visiting writer. Thankfully, the children were playing with Captain in the snug at the time.

In the afternoon I produced Wigtown Radio for an hour between 3 and 4 p.m.

After the shop closed I went with Anna, Carol-Ann, Astrid and Stuart to Anupa’s opening night. Nicky, Stuart and I then went on to Lauren McQuistin’s Art Song event, then finally to Wigtown’s Got Talent. Stuart seemed particularly impressed by Lauren’s event. Drinks back here afterwards, Astrid slept in the festival bed, which the Italians had conveniently left free.

Till total £989.30

95 customers

Online orders: 4

Books found: 3

Nicky in at 9 a.m. Maria arrived hot on her heels, and told me that the fridge wasn’t working, so I stripped the plug and replaced the fuse, then drove to the dump in Newton Stewart with all the empty bottles and bin bags of paper plates from yesterday.

Lee Randall, a journalist who chairs events during the festival, asked me if I could find some books in the shop with unusual titles for an event she is chairing – Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club. I managed to find her a few, including a huge medical book called The Rectum . She looked through it briefly before putting it on the counter and announcing, ‘Very interesting. I have got almost every condition in that book.’

Anna and the actors performed scenes from The Big Sleep and Notting Hill in the shop, once more to the confusion and joy of all who witnessed it. I overheard a young woman whispering, ‘It’s immersive theatre’ to her bewildered mother.

I spotted Mr Deacon chatting to Menzies Campbell outside an event as I was walking from the shop to the festival office to see Eliot about an author who needed a projector for his talk. I have been to a few talks that Mr Deacon has also attended. If he ever asks a question – and he usually does – it is always met by the speaker to whom it is directed with the response ‘That is a very interesting question.’

Nicky found a book by Ian Hay in which the main character is called Nicky. Rather than work, she spent most of the day reading it and chuckling. Apparently there is another character in it called Stiffy, who she has decided is me, and she is editing it to suit her own narrative.

The Writers’ Retreat was busy all day: Kate Adie, Menzies Campbell, Clare Short, Kirsty Wark and Jonathan Miller, among others. For a brief moment they were all chatting in the shop. It was like a literary salon.

It was, unsurprisingly, a late night here, with Eliot bringing a crowd of writers back. At one point Stuart Kelly had poured himself a glass of wine which Eliot snatched from his hand and began to drink, leaving Stuart looking perplexed. Later, to compound the offence, Stuart was tidying up the Retreat (at about 2 a.m.) when he discovered a pair of shoes under a table, so he moved them and put them in the hall. When Eliot discovered that they were his, he asked Stuart to go and get them for him. At this point Stuart was carrying a large pile of newspapers, which he dropped on Eliot’s feet, saying, ‘Extra, extra, read all about it. Festival director unable to fetch his own shoes.’