The Aardvark Blog

Wanting to Be Liked
18/08/2023

The summer is generally a good time for the ego, as thousands of first time and existing customers arrive at the Bookery, and many of them make positive comments. After a while one tends to take such plaudits in one’s stride and to almost come to expect them as a matter of course.

But pride comes before a bumpsidaisy, and this morning Ethel came into our palatial kitchen whence I was enjoying a mouthful of muesli and blueberries, to tell me that she had received a negative response to her latest email. The respondent informed Ethel that they would no longer be darkening the doorstep of her establishment, due to the long hair and abruptness of the gentleman on the front counter.

Now whilst we I do have other male colleagues none of them have either long hair or a tendency to hang out on the front counter. I immediately felt a deep shame at what had obviously been a less than perfect encounter. Worse the scribe said that he could go further, but had decided not to. Oh god I thought, what can I have done worse than being both long haired and abrupt. Did I perhaps question his book choices. Or his choice of football team ( only Spurs fans can truly claim to have the souls of poets). Or make any one of the  foolish and unthinking comments that I am capable of making, particularly when tired.

Worse is to come.Then one remembers all the other criticisms one has received over the last twenty years. The time that an online customer accused me of having ruined the birthday party of an 85 year old by sending the wrong pre-war edition of Pitman’s shorthand. The couple who announced that they would not come back to the shop due to our posting the government’s COVID rules. I could go further, but what fetid burrows my unhallowed halls represent.

Then as is the nature of the human spirit, one’s temper does a 180. Harrumph. Don’t these critters realise how difficult it is to run a small business in 2023. What with energy and rates hikes, a frequently changing public mood, and rising interest rates. Let them walk a mile in our shoes and have to deal with the customers who come in looking for impossible books ( no known copies for sale in the world ), who supply the wrong author, title or both. Who do not even know the title, but can tell you where they were when they first encountered it. I could go further …

But then mortification reasserts itself and one thinks of the times that one has been feeling somewhat below par and have perhaps not been at one’s absolute best. This summer I have been coping with a painful knee. I have had to take out my funeral suit more than I would have liked. And indeed have had to send too many consoling emails and cards. No it has to be faced, I have not always been  on my A-Game, and have, like the audience berated by Yeats at the first performance of the 'Playboy of the Western World',occasionally disgraced myself .

So my unhappy correspondent let me make you an offer. Let us let bygones be begonias. Come lighten our doorstep again, and if suitable notice is given I will both promise to have a hair cut - in truth overdue - and to radiate only sunbeams and be the paladin bookseller you deserve. But may I ask one small favour in return. Why not also seek to be the perfect customer.

Let us meet in the middle and dance to the light of a literary moon.