Diary of a Shopkeeper, 4th October
I came into the shop on Saturday morning to find a brown envelope lying on the doormat. It was a bit damp around the edges, not surprising given the weather. There was nothing but my name written on the front, in black biro capitals.
I opened it up. Three sheets of lined paper, covered in rather scrawly handwriting. I flicked through to the end. No signature, no address, no note of explanation. Strange.
Saturday is always a busy day, so it wasn’t till I was eating some oatcakes and cheese at the back of one that I had the chance to get the pages out again and read them properly.
What follows is a transcription of what I found. Who wrote it and what they intended I still don’t know. All all I can say is that it summons up a particular mood, a state of mind even, that is pretty common at the moment.
I try to steer clear of that mood myself, and with the help of my cheery work colleagues and BID comrades I usually do. But I think it’s worth publishing for the record: a clear if rather gloomy account of how one Orcadian was seeing the world in early October 2020.
. . .
ORKNEY. Autumn term lately over, and the kids back sitting in their bedrooms. Implacable October weather. As much mud in the fields as if Noah’s flood had newly retired from the face of the earth. It would not be surprising to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Wideford Hill.
Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle. Flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes gone into mourning. Mourning perhaps, for the death of the sun. Or the pub lunch. Or the Lux.
Kye, undistinguishable in gutter. Ponies, scarcely better, eltit to their withers. Sheep, downcast and drookit, chew soaking grass under soaking fleece.
Also in fleeces, late-season tourists – jostling one another’s backpacks in a mist of ill-temper – lose their foot-hold at street-corners, where scant scatterings of locals have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke.)
Rain everywhere. Rain up in the north isles, where it falls on white sands, heather, and heifers; rain down in the south isles, where it falls on boulder beaches, concrete piers and oil tanks. Rain on the pasture, rain on the peatbog. Rain seeping into the cabins of creel-boats; rain dripping down the funnels of Northlink ferries; rain pouring on the decks and gangways of ro-ros.
Rain in the eyes and throats of the pierhead parliament. Rain soaking the grim, determined smokers outside pub doors. Rain cruelly drenching the smart shirts and party dresses of folk insisting on a good night out – table of four, two households max.
Random tourists at the harbour – they came on holiday by mistake – peering over the railings into a basin pocked with raindrops, endless smirr all around them. It’s like they’re up in a balloon, hanging in the misty clouds.
Lights loom through the rain along the plainstone streets, cars inching along, wipers scraping, drivers peering through fogging windscreens. All of the shops lighted all day, windows bonnie as the wit of shopkeeper can make them, contents bravely colourful behind water streaming down the sheet glass.
With a slippery bagful of shopping. Or a miserable kid keen to get home. Or a walk-starved dog keen to carry on. From under our dripping hoods and behind our sodden masks, always the same sigh: “This is getting boring now.” Always the same question: “When will it end?”
. . .
And there the strange manuscript cuts off. We’d all like to know the answer to the writer’s final question, but I don’t suppose we will for a while yet.
Until we do, let’s do our best to stay dry, stay warm, stay cheery. If we must go out in the rain, let’s do it in the spirit of the exercise-starved dog: energetic, inquisitive, insistent that The Walk Must Go On.
And if the author of this piece of writing wants to get in touch with me through the usual channels, I’d be delighted to see any further writing they may have produced. And I’d be specially interested to know how they got their manuscript in and onto my shop doormat, seeing as there’s no letter box.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 8th October. Other diaries will appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.
Any errors in this diary are entirely the responsibility of the unknown author of the mysterious manuscript, and of course Charles Dickens, on whose novel Bleak House our unknown writer closely based his or her observations.