Old Lady's last days
What a strange week it’s been. After many days of freezing temperatures, ice and snow (unheard of in the pre-Christmas season on the West coast – for a good few decades, at least) our drive is still like an ice skating rink. We have to scramble up the high bank at the back of the house to get in and out – though fortunately we managed to get the cars up there earlier in the week, before it got really bad. Feeding the geese and sheep yesterday morning meant sliding on my backside all the way down the field to the byre and crawling on hands and knees from there to the various feed troughs (all this, of course, while David was enjoying the sights and sounds and liquid refreshments available in Thurso…) Oddly the sheep seemed quite happy to share their breakfast with a suddenly-diminished human, brought right down to their level, and just crowded around me as if it was all perfectly normal. Nobody offered me a piece of beet pulp, though … And to cap it all, the Old Lady died. No, not some neighbour or aunt, but an elderly araucana hen who has been with me since I first moved here and started keeping hens, back in 2003. She had a very good life and laid some very fine eggs and was very tame by the end, but it was sad to see her go. For the couple of days before she died she’d been staggering around the field as if she’d had a sherry too many, but it didn’t stop her running for the grain when it came to early evening feeding time. Hens, surprisingly perhaps, do have little characters all of their own, and she was a big character in the chicken world.
Meanwhile, on the publishing front … still fairly quiet days here, punctuated only by A Big Event in the publishing world as two of the major book wholesalers in the country, both part of the Woolworths group, look likely to go bust, taking a whole whack of publishers’ money along with them. EUK stocks books mostly on behalf of the big supermarkets, so there’s no issue there for someone like Two Ravens Press, but it’s certainly threatened to hurt a bunch of the bigger publishers in a big way. Bertrams, one of two main non-supermarket book wholesalers in the country (the other being Gardners) seems so far to be holding its own, which is good news for the rest of us. Bertrams buy a fairly large number of our books on behalf of bookstores, but because they don’t hold our books in stock (as Gardners do) happily we have little exposure to losses if they do go under – maybe an unpaid invoice for a dozen books or so, but that’s it. Still, it is a scary thing.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph has downgraded the role of its literary editor along with the departure of Sam Leith, which will almost certainly result in smaller amounts of book coverage – a worrying trend in major US newspapers that looks set to continue over here. Happily the Times Group, Independent group and Guardian/Observer groups are still going strong with lots of good book coverage – but you have to wonder for how long.
Strange days.
Sharon
