Re-opening day.

20 minutes of sitting and I was £20 better off which heartened me. All 'old' customers and pleased to see me back, encourage me and so on. It's so long since I bought any stock it's like money for old rope. I had been very grumpy about opening and made a grumpy sign with the lion from the Bad Child's Book of Beasts saying 'No mobiles, No food or drink.' My friend suggested I should put: 'No Customers.'

Point taken.

With no computer to play on there's no temptation to trawl the net so I finished James Patterson 'Along Came a Spider' which was darkish but, it has to be said, the man can write. Then I moved on to a biography of Stevie Smith since I am sitting down by the biogs. More of that later. By 11.55 I was pretty bored, even with Stevie. She didn't have a very exciting life.

I'm finaly utilising only the official shop which is a very small space but gives the rest of the house more privacy and I don't have to worry about customer conversations unsettling Chloe's patients. On a hot day it's cool with its thick stone walls, north facing windows (no worry about fading) and a good through draft. I still felt fidgety and trapped after a short while. People kept coming in and actually buying so that pinned me to the seat until coffee time. By the end of the day I've taken enough to pay for some the framing of three b&w phots by an Irish photographer, Giles Norman, as gifts for Sophie's Nick ( sullen looking Johnny Depp look-alike in Paris in slouch hat and trench coat) Sophie (a blissed-out cat in a shaft of sun in a Venetian doorway) and Chloe (a shaggy horse grazing unfettered in the garden of an abandoned cottage in Ireland. They're brilliant photos in a book brought back from Kinsale by C&G from their honeymoon. The book sits on a shelf with no-one looking at it so I've carefully sliced out the three pics. They can now go on walls and be enjoyed.

Yesterday was hard work. Lots of changes to be made so the stock in the shop can all be half price or less. The earnest worthies of the poetry, plays, philosophy, music, lit.crit. and reference sections have given way to erotica (inyerface just inside the door) sci-fi, westerns, psychology, psychotherapy, self-help, New Age, blah blah. C,I and S cycled 6 miles down to help me under the cruelly beating sun. Most noble of them. They did the heavy slogging whilst I directed and fluttered, but I did cook them crispy duck (breasts thrown in the oven skin side up for 1 hour, my latest delight) & new potatotoes which we ate with salad in the cool with chilled wine, pear cider, and smoothie.


I'd a pleasant walk on Saturday with K. She promised me bluebells. They are discouragingly hard to find en masse as I remember them from childhood, gathering arm-fulls to take home to glow briefly in the living room window of the tiny cottage where I grew up. A few scattered here and there along the wayside are pretty but don't offer the same nourishment to the soul. England is blessed with oceans of bluebell. It must be the soil.

We didn't find oceans enough to slake my thirst but there were smell rivulets of blue and the scent was beautiful. The estate these treasure almost-thrive on is one of the smaller and less kempt in the area. The owners put most of their energies into all things horsey but from time to time the laird (if he can be so grandly designated) has an idea. We walked past several of these ideas. A pond scooped out and lined with black plastic then forgotten until it is entirely green with duck weed. Another larger pond, almost a lake, distressingly square and man-made which spooked me with its darkness and lifelessness. A Japanese garden in which a bridge spans nothing and weeds grow in abundance. Even the walks which he has been helpfully developing so folk can browse through his acres were weirdly sprayed with weed-killer along the edges. If giant hogweed had been growing there I could have understood it but the poor dead plants had been foxgloves. All rather depressing.

I can hardly talk. My own estate is a riot of growth at the moment, most of which shouldn't be allowed to get above itself in this way. Either it's too hot for me to be outside and I would rather be by the sea or it's rainy and I'd rather be curled up with a book. Really a nice apartment somewhere with a gardener employed in the communal gardens to keep the shrubs neat and the lawns manicured would be more in my line.