It is the calm, if not torpor, of January in the Oxfam shop when the heady days of taking £3,000 in a week are a dim memory.

Like retailers everywhere, we in the Oxfam shop have to make the most of Christmas trading.

And, that takes quite a lot of planning and execution – and it is not like I am new to all this, I have been doing it for a number of years.

But there is one aspect which catches me out every January – what went where before?

If you are so post-Christmas you cannot bear the thought of reading about anything to do with the that ridiculously extended period of over-spending, over-eating and you are certainly over all of it, please do feel free to skip some of the following paragraphs.

From September onwards we collect donated books which are in such good a state, they could be given as a Christmas gift without anyone knowing they were from a charity shop.

(Now, that is not to say that all our customers want to shield their recipients from the source of their gift

Indeed, this year we had more customers than ever who told us their family rule was to buy everything from charity shops, and one family who arrived en masse on Christmas Eve to copy the Icelandic custom of buying each other books so they could sit and read them during the night before Christmas.)

So, we had more than 20 crates of books that were either Christmas gift books, Christmassy fiction, non fiction, children’s books, music or DVDs.

Those, along with the Oxfam new goods – baskets, rugs, chocolate, cards, decorations and so on –  take up a lot of room.

And they go – the shop ‘eats’ up all those goods in the big spend weeks – and afterwards, when they have sold (mostly) there are all sorts of gaps and empty shelves.

You would think, and you would be right to think, it should not take a genius to work out what was there before and re-instate.

But hey ho, it is never that simple.

On the Thursday after Christmas, I was in all day but unfortunately I was the only person in all day who was a crate-of-books mover.

So, I moved and moved, re-stocked, juggled, moved, re-juggled and generally did my back in.

And I have been doing that ever since, but still the shop is not quite back to normal.

It was easy to put the art section back where it had been displaced from by the need to have front-facing books.

(Front-facers are what they sound like – books on a stand showing their face not their spine, and front facers sells much more quickly than spine-facing books.

Needless to say they take up more room but they are the ones which make the shop look good.)

I know that Old and Interesting need to go back where the leftover unsold socks are, but we still have socks in place so that might have to be juggled about a bit.

Of course, being an Oxfam shop we are reliant on donations, and those can fluctuate

Before Christmas lots of people have a clear out – you might think that should be a January job and I would agree with you.

And it is not just quantity – subject matter fluctuates all the time. (Though the day we are short of biographies of famous people is the day I will eat my hat.)

So, when I decided to re-instate the shelf on how to paint or draw – usually we have lots of those books – imagine my dismay when we didn’t have any

Nor indeed could I replace them with how to knit or sew, or collect Victorian porcelain or take up calligraphy….. there weren’t any.

And of course, the table has to be kept looking good. After all the glam and razzmatazz of Christmas tables, January’s need to be calm, thoughtful and quirky without being in your face. 

And I have to say they are a bit scrabbled together because we have used up so much energy and time on the Christmas books that little brain or shop space has been given over to the aftermath

And it is pretty annoying when you have created a table display from a box or two found under a shelf and told the volunteer on the till to make sure they don’t sell anything because we have no back up, to find half of it gone 20 minutes later.

Mind you, we did a nice table of stuff I had lying about. Instead of resolutions, we went with ‘learn something new.’

I thought it was rather inspired to put out a book on cardboard modelling, another on telepathy and one on how to train your dog…..

Still, in this peace and quiet time I can look through those books which might be worth something – a 1747 small book of Sophocles in Greek, to research the tiny bookbinder’s mark to see if the otherwise boring volume is worth more than I think…..

It is the time to start planning table and window displays for the next few months, to think about finally getting rid of the socks and bringing out the old travel books and trying to value the old maps – notoriously hard.

And generally get back to the gentle running of a bookshop – until the urge or necessity to clear out bookshelves, garages, attics and parents’ homes kicks in again and dealing with a boxes and boxes of donations means all those nice pleasures get put to one side.