I arrive at the shop carrying two very heavy, and large history books. Not just any history books but two of three volumes ( we don’t have the missing one,) of a history of the Kings and Queens of England compiled in 1706.

The entry on each ruler was done by a different author – one of them being John Milton.

The front covers were there but not attached, but the sound of the paper as you turn the pages is that lovely sound of really old, good paper and you can see the ’s’s were printed  as ‘f’s’ – and, of course, all of it was set and printed by hand.

Because of the condition, and the missing volume, they couldn’t be sold for much and although £5.99 for the two is ridiculously cheap, given the 312 years they have survived, it is a realistic price for us – I have checked (exhaustively).

There is more about these books, but before I go any further, I must warn you that this was a long and very busy day and so, if you were planning a quick read, now is the time to give up, and go and do what you were planning to do.

It is 9am.

The first thing we always do on a Thursday is to to get the kettle on.

Then we had a meeting.

Now in our shop, we don’t have manager-called staff/volunteer meetings – I think the last one was a year ago – but we do need to sort out the run up to Christmas, so we had a one amongst ourselves. 

The five of us who were there, set about thinking through what could be on the table and what could be in the window, how we could make the shop look extra good in the run up to our best selling time of year.

And now we have a list – it might change, not least because we have to have the books to fit the ideas – and that is always a gamble when you are relying on donations.

(We have some things in hand. For the past six months, we have been collecting books on the World War I ready for November’s anniversary, we have a good collection of photography books, ancient civilisations and some others…)

I will talk/have meetings with other books-sorters over the coming weeks and tell them what we have come up with, and we will no doubt change, develop, amend ideas depending on what they say.

Still, we have a plan, and that feels good.

I am not a great fan of Christmas, but in the shop, I love it. 

This is the time when we can really make money, and more than that, we can really make it look extra  good.

It is now about 10am.

I go out to get the prescription medicine from Boots, the copy of The Times and the bird food that I collect every week for a volunteer who fell over, nearly three years ago, and broke her wrist.

She thought it would mean be a few weeks off and she would be back, but ill-health and a badly-set wrist, has meant she hasn’t been.

So every week, I collect the stuff she needs and my, excellent in so many ways, fellow volunteer D, takes them to her on his way home and he, or I, sometimes slip in a treat of chocolate as it is not much fun being old and not well, and having no family around.

We tell her they are Oxfam gifts.

Anyway, I get back to find that the aftermath of the parish church’s fete means that literally trolley loads of unsold books are heading our way.

D, realising that we would be inundated, has persuaded the church donor to let him go through the books at the church and just take the ones he thought we could sell. 

He has gone off to do so.

Phew.

I took over sorting the books that had come in.

It is now about 11 am.

I am still sorting. D comes back, and we carry on sorting and pricing and shelving. Him upstairs and me downstairs.

A young woman comes in asking for a volunteer form. I tell her that the process will take some weeks, but we are looking forward to her joining us.

She is volunteering at Christmas, she tells us, to cook and serve food to people who are one their own over the festivities, and she really likes books and wants to work here too.

I wonder whether the very long silence between her putting her form in and hearing from us will put her off – I hope not.

Meanwhile, J, the person who is on the till, unflappable, calm, organised and ever-helpful, has cleared and re-shelved the previous books on the the table, so that we can surround the books mentioned at the start, with other – not as interesting, but hey ho – history books.

(Every week, she polishes the table in between displays, with proper wood-feeding polish and elbow grease. ‘It needs to look good,’ she said when she sent me out to buy some decent polish a few months ago.)

Our window is dressed/designed by another volunteer called J.

She does a different, and very good, window every other week. Customers come in and comment on it.

We are on week-two of the art window so she has re-jigged, up-dated, got ‘new’ stock in it to make it look good.

(It has sold very well – including the prints from books that my husband has framed – not bad at £45 each, and a boost to the weekly income.)

Given that she wasn’t re-doing the whole window, and she was thinking ‘art’, and as she was looking to do something else useful, she gets most of the art books from upstairs and brings them down onto the art shelves – those shelves were looking a bit thin but now they look fat and healthy.

She also re-does the podiums and other stylish stuff – her forte.

D and I are still sorting books.

J, the one on the till, needs change – customers buying a £2.49 book with a £20 note…. and, as she checks the state of the blue change bag upstairs every Thursday morning and almost invariably finds a £10 note in it, she tells me to get change so the next shift will have their change ready as well the change she needs. 

So, I go next door to the HSBC bank where they know me – and supply pound coins by the basket full.

(One of the women who works there, had told me her son was really interested in natural history. So one day recently, when getting pound coins, I gave her a book on Darwin’s Beagle voyage. 

I was going to throw it away – it was not in a good enough state to sell and it was a small thank you for all the change they give us – but I thought it might be a bit too advanced for her young son.

Some weeks later she told me that he had loved it, and read it throughout the long flight to South Africa – and is now re-reading it. 

One of the other bank-tellers is Polish but/and is fascinated by the English language and semiotics (she did her masters in English language.) So, every now and then I give her a book on language – one that we would throw away  – and she reads it, and then tells me about it when I am in there getting change.)

Meanwhile, donations are coming in.

The re-cycle bin is full.

We now have a written briefing by our manager to say that we are not allowed to put the books into the general bin – there would be an additional cost to the shop.

And the donations are coming in.

D and I fill carrier bags, Ikea bags, any bags we can find, with books destined for the book-afterlife – as well as boxes of books that might find a buyer somewhere and somewhen via Oxfam’s central warehouse.

The bags will have to wait until the re-cycle bin is emptied – but that happens when?

We don’t know what the emptying regime is.

And we fill crates of books that we think we can sell, and which need pricing and shelving, presenting – and hopefully – selling.

D has to go – his father is ill in hospital and his mother has a broken wrist – but he has come in, and we would not have coped without him.

And, he will still make time to deliver the medicine, bird food, The Times, and have a chat with the now almost-housebound volunteer I mentioned earlier –  these days I see her more rarely than he does, but we speak on the phone. 

Meanwhile, one of our volunteers who works a shift on Wednesday afternoons and comes in as well, yes for another shift, on a Thursday when there is a need, has called in.

He comes in every Thursday morning to see if he is needed in the afternoon.

This Thursday he had come in, early in the morning, and asked if he needed to come in later and, if not, he had something else to do. 

I had said, blithely, that we could manage.

But that was a mistake.

Because, as he was leaving, D mentions that the afternoon till volunteer is not coming in.

It is now about 12 noon.

I haven’t yet been upstairs – I had been a bit busy – to see on the calendar that the afternoon volunteer was away.

And you need two people in the shop to be Oxfam-legal. And that left only me for the afternoon.

So, I call the shop manager and left a message asking if he could give me the Thursday extra-volunteer’s number so then I could ask him if he could, in fact, come in.

The manager calls back to say he had called the volunteer’s home and heard he was out for the afternoon and he says, ‘ You will just have to  close the shop.’

I am annoyed for not looking at the calendar – and there are still books to be sorted, in fact lots of them, so I should be doing something more useful than just berating myself.

Closing the shop, of course, means we lose sales, and things are never good enough that we want to want to do that.

The calm, unflappable volunteer J, who is more than active but not used to doing a full day’s work these days, says, ‘ Give me half an hour to go home and get some lunch, and I will come back and do the afternoon with you.’

I hugged her, but thought that there must be someone else.

I call a volunteer who turned out to be in Sheffield minding her grandchildren, another who said she was picking up her grandchildren, another who was out, another had a doctor’s appointment and so on and so on, and then finally another volunteer calls back and said he is driving back from Southampton, so will be a bit late but yes, he will come in.

I don’t hug him – but I would have. 

He is also called J.

It is now about 1.30pm.

J comes in and between us, during the afternoon, we get almost every donated book sorted, him upstairs and me downstairs – in a bag ready to go in a bin when one is available, in a box to go to the warehouse, or priced and on a shelf.

We talk about the crates we need to set up ready to receive books we were going to collect for the window and table in the run up to Christmas.

We talk about clearing the box of overflow travel books which has been sitting upstairs  – and ignored – for weeks and weeks –  and which, I have to say, is full of books many of which shouldn’t ever hit our shop shelves.

We talk about Monday morning when he would be in, and Monday afternoon when I would be in, and how we could overlap so that we can do some ‘real sorting out.’ 

(All getting ready for the Christmas run – we are nothing if not getting ready.)

Meanwhile, I am on the till.

I count during the afternoon, and 11 people who come into the shop look at those special history books – remember those from the beginning?

None of them buy those books, but so many of them talk to me about them. ( And, they do sell the next day and the volunteer who sold them was so pleased, she contacted me to tell me.)

And some of those customers go on on to buy other books.

That is what a good table does – it draws people into the shop and, hopefully, they go on to buy other books.

We like the table to be noticed – and customers notice the table, and more than the table, they notice the window, volunteers notice and comment on them – and that makes worthwhile all the weeks of effort, collecting, organising, thinking about them, planning.

Meanwhile, J and I sort more donations.

Every shift says that they get more donations than any other time of the week, but the truth is, thankfully or we would be in deep trouble, they come in all the time.

The last one comes in at 4.50 and we close at 5 ….. but J and I clear it.

It is a very good feeling to look around the back room and the upstairs room and know that you have sorted it all, well, more or less.

Meanwhile, J has also re-stocked the academic shelves, and I have re-stocked cookery, putting all the cooks/chefs in alphabetical order – probably a bit OCD but commentated on favourably by a customer. 

I have changed the front-facing books – and that matters because they sell more quickly, and also customers notice if they are same week after week – I have sold three newly front-faced books in the afternoon.

And three ‘art works’ from the window, by the way.

I have put out a collection of ‘old and interesting’ travel books on the top shelf of that module and made a mental note that the travel shelves really need a good sort out – perhaps on Monday if I have time…..

Meanwhile, a customer come in (and says in passing, as people do when you engage with them, he used to be a violin player but was now a singer), and he had been in the week before, and bought £30 worth of classical CDs.

I had heard about this from another volunteer and had texted the classical music volunteer to tell him so – usually in on a Thursday, but away at the moment.

He was, not surprisingly, pleased.

This visit the customer bought only a few CDs, but he wanted to say that our ‘classical volunteer’ knows what he is about.

And, yes, I text the volunteer again even though I know he is on a ramblers’ scout for a long walk in the Cotswolds.

Meanwhile, there is a ham and coleslaw sandwich in the fridge that I never had time to eat.

It is 5 pm.

And time to shut up shop and see how much we have made.

Before I cash up, I look around the shop and I see a clear back room – of course it  it won’t stay like that, but it is a good moment.

I straighten the paperback fiction and the children’s fiction, put one or two books straight on the table, check that the window has no gaps, make a list of things that need doing on Monday, talk to J who is just putting a few new books on the academic shelves and who will be in on Monday to start all over again….

I am just locking up the shop when I see a man approaching.

On Monday when I was shutting up, my fellow volunteer said ‘No, you can’t shut yet.’ 

She told me that there was a regular who came and got to the shop depending on when the bus arrived – and it was always just before or after 5pm.

So, today I held the door open for him.

He bought nothing today, but on Monday he might, and he really appreciated that he could get in to our shop even if the bus was a bit late.

We made about £268 –  not bad for a Thursday.