If you’re young and running a business, you have the great advantages of fresh ideas, energy and optimism. All qualities that we’re going to need in abundance in the difficult months and years ahead.

If you’ve been running a business for 10 or 20 years you have one thing that the youngsters don’t: experience. That doesn’t mean that you make the right decisions all the time, but it does make planning easier.

Every year has the same rhythms and repeating patterns. For Kirkness & Gorie, like many shops, January is a big sale followed by stocktaking. February and March are dead quiet. There’s a blip of busyness at Easter as the first tourists arrive – though that’s largely cancelled out by local folk going away to be tourists elsewhere.

Mid-May to mid-September are the busiest months of the year, with short extra boosts at Folk Festival and St Magnus Festival, and of course our own Wine Festival. Show week is another extra boost.

By the time we get to late September, October and November, we’re very grateful we had those boosts, because those are all very quiet, loss-making months, when you gradually use up any cash you were able to save over the summer.

Then it’s the mad whirl of Christmas and the whole thing starts over again.

Every year we plot these important dates on a wall-chart, so we can plan opening hours and staff numbers accordingly. We also write up when liners are calling in, and how many passengers are on each one. We reckon that on average liner passengers spend about 50p per head in our shop, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But if there are 5,000 passengers scheduled over a week, the extra £2,500 goes a long way towards paying staff wages, suppliers and overheads during the quiet months.

Based on the wallchart, we then do financial projections, mapping out sales, purchases, wages, rent, insurance, advertising and all the other income and expenditure for the year.

It’s wonderful to know where you’re going when you set out into each new year. It means you don’t panic when you’re deep in the red in March, and you don’t let down customers because you’re understaffed in August.

In a normal year we are pretty good at knowing where we’re going. But this year?

This year all our forecasts are as accurate as Michael Fish proclaiming, ‘There will be no hurricane!’ in 1987.

Plans for income we made back at the start of the year have been rendered meaningless by the long lockdown, and slow recovery. Emergency planning we put in place in early July, when the date of the 15th was announced as the restarting of tourism, haven’t turned out to be accurate predictions, as very few tourists turned up in July. And though there are a few more in August, numbers who make it down the street seem to vary widely from “quite a lot” one day (making us under-staffed) to “none at all” the next day (making us over-staffed.)

And what will happen in September, October and November? Will they be slightly busier than usual as Orcadians make a conscious decision to support their local community and shop local? Or will there still be a nervousness about going out and about, with folk dashing in an out of supermarkets and buying online?

And how about Christmas? Will it be the blaze of light it usually is in the long dark winter?

Nobody knows, and the uncertainty introduces what Birsay writer Samantha Clark calls, in her recent book The Clearing, “a gloaming state of mind.” It’s a condition, she says, of “not quite being able to see the way ahead but carrying on anyway.”

A lot of businesses are hoping for the best, but planning for a range of options from bad to very bad to worst. “You just go gloaming on through the fog,” Clark says, “towards the next step, the next word, the next decision.”

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 13th August 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.

The Clearing by Samantha Clark (Little, Brown, 2020) is available from all local bookshops and is highly recommended.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 9th August