Читать книгу Confessions of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell - Страница 74

Online orders: 3

Orders found: 1

Only found one of the orders. One of those unlocated was a 1970s Highland Region winter bus timetable.

The first customers of the week were a German couple who bought £37 worth of cookery books, mainly by Jamie Oliver.

An American customer came to the counter at 4 p.m. and asked ‘Do you have any old maps?’

Me: Yes, how old?

Customer: Quite old. What’s your oldest book?

Me: At the moment it’s this one here. It was published in 1582.

Customer: Wow. That’s, like, 300 years old.

He was only out by 133 years.

This is the time of year when the River Cree, which flows through nearby Newton Stewart, sees its annual migration of sparling. These are small fish that come up the river with the tide (they’re notoriously bad swimmers—a bit of a bummer if you’re a fish) for a few hours, just once a year, to spawn. The Cree is the only river on the west coast of Scotland that still has a sparling population, and their appearance is one of the positive signs that we’re slowly creeping out of the long winter.