The Scarthin Way -How Independent Bookshops can Survive?

“We’re just here to get some Lunch”; How can Independent Bookshops Survive?

Can bookshops survive on the High Street – or anywhere else for that matter?  By sticking obstinately to our well-tried ways perhaps? To quote the opening of our own bookshop leaflet: Welcome to the picturesque performances of this ancient trade, daily and free of charge! Growing since 1497 (or was it 1794), free of plans, budgets, missions statements and piped music…Or should we be going with the flow, “growing” our footfall, offering wi-fi, downloads and Kindles – not forgetting coffee. Scarthin Books has long had a busy café; only today I overheard the phrase, spoken into a mobile phone, that heads this article. At least the speaker finished by saying “but afterwards we’ll have a mooch around in case there’s any books we want.”

Popping into Janette Ray’s little rare-book shop, in a historic York thronged with half-term visitors, I was handed a leaflet listing no less than thirteen booksellers in the City. How can so many survive, even in York? These days we are told how many bookshops, as well as pubs, are closing, but we still wonder how so many of both can survive, and the sobering reasons for survival are often the same for bookshops as they are pubs: many offer only a part-time wage to their owners and next to none for employed staff; many are retirement pastimes; many are run for personal satisfaction by proprietors who don’t need (even if they hope for) a significant income. How do you earn a proper living as publican or bookseller these days?

Bookshops have opportunities not open to pubs. Firstly, two of the York bookshops are run by Oxfam, benefiting from the gift of stock, from voluntary labour and from charitable status. I don’t know of any “charity pubs”, though there is a growing movement to run both pubs and bookshops as “community” enterprises. Secondly, several of the shops are in reality fronts for a radically different type of business, namely the sale of valuable rare and antiquarian volumes through private networks, catalogues, bookfairs and internet sites. The shop, with its glittering stock of “handpicked” volumes, is not expected to sell much over the counter, it is there to establish the credentials of the business and to attract the rarities that are the real bread and butter of the well-connected, scholarly proprietor; indeed two of the York shops are not even open to the public except by appointment, and another warns the visitor that it is only “usually” open during its business hours. I suppose some pubs have traditionally been fronts for other related activities, the most respectable of which might involve live music or nightclubs for teens and twenties, and many have now diversified into selling coffees and meals – more about diversification later. The third striking difference between the list of York bookshops and the world of pubs is that, excepting Oxfam, none of the York booksellers are part of a national chain. theres no equivalent of Witherspoon’s.

Wait a minute, you will be objecting, what about Waterstones and W.H.Smith’s! You’ve found me out! I deliberately hadn’t mentioned that the York leaflet lists only “secondhand and antiquarian booksellers” and it is these that I’ve been discussing so far. What sort of animals are new-book bookshops? If you go onto the web and search for the Booksellers Association (BA) you will find that their database lists ten members in York, not far short of the number of secondhand and antiquarian businesses. It seems that new bookshops must be surviving too. This initial impression is misleading; the York booksellers include not only two branches of the  W.H.Smith newsagents’ chain, one Waterstone’s,  a Wesley Owen Christian Bookshop and a Blackwell’s University Bookshop, but also FOUR supermarkets – two Tescos and two Sainsburys. In contrast to the TEN independents out of thirteen second-hand and antiquarian booksellers, there is only ONE independent out of ten new bookshops– the Little Apple Bookshop in High Petergate. Sellers of old books insist on individual freedom, sellers of new books are chained together. Survival as a new bookshop seems almost to require being part of a chain, benefiting from the advantages of scale in advertising and being able to buy at preferential discounts. Relatively late entrants into bookselling, the giant supermarket chains are now increasing their booksales (not “growing” them, please) by double-figure percentages annually and are, along with Amazon and other internet sellers, threatening even the largest specialist bookselling chains. What hope can there be for the individually owned and operated independent bookshops?

 Despite the domination of their subscription-base by giant chains, the BA has latterly been trying to raise the profile of the Independents with shared marketing campaigns and “Independent Booksellers Week”. Too little, too late, I fear; the number of independent shops has shrunk by a third within the last decade. In this situation, I was very surprised to find the Trade Association we’ve been a member of for 38 years suddenly introducing a major price-hike to our annual membership fee - for the first time in all those years, they are calculating our subscription on the basis of our TOTAL booksales, not just sales of new books, but sales of second-hand and antiquarian books too!

Why have the BA finally caught up with the secret of Scarthin Books (and before us, of Galloway and Porter in Cambridge, for instance), that a good way to thrive is to sell both new and old books? It seems that four years ago a survey of the American book scene revealed that an actual majority of shops there do both.  In our shop, we realised from the beginning that being a substantial stockist of second-hand books adds depth and excitement to an otherwise predictably fashion-following new bookshop, while the stocking of new up-to-the-minute books keeps a second-hand bookshop young, inviting and inclusive, rather than gloomy and forbidding to the uninitiated. Customers often trade in their old books for new, and some of those old books are like old lamps to the collector. Children learn to like books and bookshops here in a way hardly possible in a second-hand shop. Families and friends with diverse interests can disperse to search for the latest TV cookbook or for scarce out-of-print monographs on their enthusiasm – both have at least a chance of success, and both may be diverted from new to old or from old to new. And of course there must be a café. We never feel we have been truly welcomed or have really made a place our own until we eat and drink there – whether it be a friend’s home or a mountaintop, a museum or a bookshop - and a good bookshop is a museum you can buy a bit of .

Will the Booksellers’ Association succeed in a takeover bid for ALL bookshops? It seems unlikely that most secondhand and antiquarian dealers will be interested in joining, although the ability to sell and exchange book tokens might be a carrot, and how will their own associations, the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (PBFA) and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ABA) react?  

Should booksellers stick to well-tried ways or embrace change? Why not embrace a change to the well-tried Scarthin way?

Musical Parenthood – the Agony and the Ecstasy

( All musical opinions here are personal and untutored)

Every year in Britain, year in, year out, around 700,000 babies are born but more than a million musical instruments are sold. You will not be surprised to learn that over 300,000 of these instruments are the recorders beloved of infant and junior schoolmistresses, and 200,000 are electric guitars – more than one for every two boys born. Acoustic guitars are not far behind, even if many seem to migrate to charity shops. More surprising is the sale of 300,000 portable keyboards – but perhaps many of these are Christmas toy keyboards for toddlers rather than band background blasters. That leaves about 200,000 for all the rest – woodwind, brass, “bowed instruments” and pianos, in which latter category digital models now heavily outnumber acoustic pianofortes, “free to collector” as they are often now advertised.

So EVERY CHILD must surely be learning an instrument. Well of course they are – either their parents are musicians, in which case the tradition must be cherished, or Mum or Dad failed to become musicians themselves, in which case they are desperate for their children to do better. Perhaps most couples are “mixed marriages” – a musician with a would-be musician, and this can be an especially potent background.

I’ve lots of personal experience of this – both as a semi-willing young learner myself (becoming a just-about-half-competent pianist) and as a single and a double parent ferrying my children to guitar, piano and violin lessons up dark and narrow back lanes in ingeniously secluded Derbyshire towns and villages. These days, the opportunities for young learners to perform in public are at least as great as in the mythical golden ages of the parlour song and of the competitive festival, perhaps greater than ever before. In addition to the annual concerts put on by instrument teachers and the Christmas and Easter concerts at school, there are the frequent performances by the Music Centres which have recently sprung up in nearly every town, rehearsing on a weekday evening or a Saturday morning and encompassing wind and string groups at every level from absolute beginners upwards. Well, nearly every level – every level except GOOD, you might think. Musical parents must steel themselves for about a decade of concert attendance at which your hands will be worn out by clapping and your seats made sore by sitting through far too many pieces played excruciatingly badly by far too many children including your own. The piano, at least, makes its own sound sound, and woodwind instruments, even the reedy recorder, can sound lovely at an elementary level, but teachers of other instruments seem rarely to select performance pieces that are both sufficiently challenging (not ALL on open strings) and can sound nice when played by learners. The intermediate brass will threaten to damage your inner ear, and as for strings! Well, the violin played by any but very skilled players makes a sound which is either excruciating or hilarious or both together. Every tune is out of tune and it is difficult to suppress either uncontrollable giggles or a tetanic grin of anguish. One of the most memorable ordeals of my youth was sitting in the front row of the choir, visible to everyone in the Grammar School hall, trying to keep a straight face and suppress an explosion of mirth during the mixed-masters-and-boys string quartet. Of course, our parental love and pride and the civic comradeship with other families does overcome the mirth and loathing and the tedium. It is wonderful to see how children so young learn to find their way through the intricately interwoven instrumental parts of consort pieces and how a generation seems to be growing up without the terror of performing that afflicts so many of their elders, myself particularly. Soon we will be as confident and competent as the Eisteddfodaued Welsh.

And then, suddenly, after all those years of striving and suffering, there is a joyful emergence. Suddenly the string players are good enough to join the PDSO, the Peak District String Orchestra, Founded by Pat Curteis and now conducted by Ian Naylor. Every year, a highlight is the Peak District Music Centres Christmas Concert at the Buxton Octagon. In the first half, we listen to the long progression of all the preparatory, junior, training and intermediate groups. Apparently angelic children, some pieces flatter, some over-strain their capabilities. Uninhibited applause, a re-run of the growth of our own children condensed into an hour and culminating in Jason Curteis’ spirited conducting of the ambitious and almost-there Intermediate Strings. I sit up tensely, willing them to get it right, rejoicing in the sweet passages, lamenting those slightly out-of-tune high passing notes.

Then the dash and the queue for the interval drinks, peering over heads to locate those acquaintances seen four times a year before we find our seats again for the second half and the patiently-awaited turn of the senior group of all, the PDSO, to play. Their first piece will be the Adagietto from Symphony Number 5 by Mahler. There is a hush – and suddenly we are in a quite different world. Bows and the conductor’s hands are raised and still. There is movement, but at what moment did they begin to play? Silence has become an almost inaudible whisper; the whisper swells and then sweeps into the first full chords, and, once again I’m prickling with emotion. This is what all those years of practice and performance were leading too – this beautiful, to my amateur ears exquisite and finally professional, sound. The dynamic and emotional range, the rich colours, the intensity and control, the communication between the conductor and the players – the orchestra are an enchanted unity and we are spellbound. Instead of the customary telegraphed winding up to a thunderclap ending that composers usually lay on, this piece dies away as gradually as it began. Finally the sound is imperceptible. The bristle of raised bows is still, the conductor motionless. Is that the end? The audience in the Octagon is absolutely silent. We hold our breath. Then Ian lowers his hands. We explode into applause. I cheer. They’ve done it again! Maybe there were one or two moments when the texture wasn’t quite right, or the timing slightly ragged, but it is early days, only a term since their most senior and accomplished players left, as they must each year, to go to University or Music College. How can they survive that annual loss of their most brilliant? But every year they do. (and, stop press March 09, they have one more, another concert that again felt like the best ever!) What a privilege to hear such an orchestra – what a privilege to play in it!

Not every piece will be performed with such intensity of course – there will be lighter or more rumbustious compositions during which the grins and shared laughter (which characterise the weekly practices) will be seen flickering round the benches – but every year Ian does come up with his Great Romantic Number, which will absolutely slay the audience. The first year I heard them play it was the shivery Nimrod of the Enigma Variations, then another Elgar, the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, then Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings – and this year the Mahler. Ian usually turns to the audience to introduce the Great Romantic Number, and his introduction goes something as follows – I hardly exaggerate at all, though I will stir several intros in together. The “greatest” actually applied to the Tchaikovsky.

A few words about our first piece tonight. This is almost certainly the greatest piece of music ever written for string orchestra. The lyrical initial theme is taken and reprised in a climax that is technically about as near perfect as can be. Of course, Mahler wasn’t happy composing it, to quote from his letters:

I am still working on the string piece, it will be as good as I can make it, I suppose, but how good is that? There is nothing for it but more discipline, work, work and discipline! (here Ian looks pointedly at the orchestra) Your ever-unhappy friend, Gustav.

Well, now we are going to play it for you – and it’s an extraordinarily difficult piece – it CAN sound like a landslide of lost notes – but it won’t when we play it, will it!! Here it is.

So, when they didn’t win their category in the 2007 national youth final at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, we were all outraged – they wuz robbed! – how can there really be youth orchestras elsewhere in the land better than the PDSO? Well, I suppose there is Chetham’s School, and the Yehudi Menuhin. The wonder of the PDSO is how a consort of grade 6 and upwards (and upwards +++) players can be inspired to play so impressively together. Update: In the 2009 Festival of Youth Music the PDSO at last WON their category; we don’t yet know whether they will be included in the Albert Hall concert. This last Summer, as part of twinning celebrations, Derbyshire hosted the Toyota Junior Orchestra, who played with formidable professionalism, and our daughter Ruth generously admitted that they were, well, just perfect! – but then they are the so-focused Japanese who rehearse at the end of EVERY school day, not just once a week! The Toyota juniors paid a complement to their host culture by playing a Benjamin Britten piece at once enchanting and little-known to most of us audience, and also joined with the Derbyshire City and County Youth Orchestra for a mind-blowing symphony. The City and County Youth Orchestra gets together for short residential courses just twice a year and in a few days, often under under Peter Starke and the section tutors, work up a classic or a seldom-performed work that will have you standing up and shouting for an encore! I have the CD from a couple of years ago. Almost finally, I should mention the tumultuous Wirksworth Music Centre, one of the longest established, most various and most inclusive (even of adult learners and people from Matlock!) and therefore requiring most stamina from its audiences. A host of groups currently culminate in David Francis’ Senior Strings and Chris Dixon’s Senior Recorder Consort, small groups particularly hard-hit when players leave, but both getting better and better just now!

As regards singing, rather than playing, old school-choir and choral-society hands like myself have long been bewailing the decline of school singing, perhaps because it is seen as girlish in mixed comprehensives. No-one is coming through and we are all getting older, we observe, although there is now a new wave of popular everyone-can-sing choirs who are in great demand. Round here, The Fishpond Singers and Derbyshire Diva are sucking up all the singers and would-be-singers. Formed only a year ago and already making an intriguing sound, neither childlike or “adult” is the Derbyshire Youth Chorale, twenty odd young people drawn from Derbyshire schools and directed by “King Phil”. They paid a return visit to Japan in October for a very busy week of performance and workshops and were gobsmacked by the place and their reception.

So, all is far from lost in the world of classical music here in Derbyshire; all that parental investment is worthwhile, the kids take off – and I haven’t even mentioned all the Rock Bands, and the Folk Groups, and the leaders and mentors who (sometimes) guide them, but that is another story, or rather stories.

DJM January 09

The Dave Mitchell Bookmark Collection: Meditation on a Theme

Let’s go out for the day – I wonder what’s on this weekend? A quick scan of The Independent’s weekly listings comes up with Roger Bacon at the Tate Modern or Isamu Noguchi at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. What about Arlo Guthrie on tour, or Julius Caesar at the Tobacco Factory? Maybe something completely different – Blackburn Rovers versus Hull City, or An Evening with Joan Bakewell? What’s this – The Dave Mitchell Bookmark Collection? No, I think we’ll give that a miss.

Actually, it’s a fantasy that the Independent would even list my worthy exhibition. Having a collection of bookmarks must be a specific diagnostic test for nerds. I am indeed wearing an anorak even as I type this out. Within the anorak is a hairy sweater, on my chin is a less hairy beard and on the table lie my short-sight spectacles – and I used to be a Morris Dancer. In the old Eagle Comic days (yes, my age is uncool too) I would have been an applicant (failed) for the role of Giglamps, the weedy bespectacled swat of the fourth form. I remember that in comic strip adventures the resource and intelligence of Giglamps would turn out to be vital at a crucial moment, and indeed it is people like me, or as I try to be, that RUN THE WORLD! You un-nerds are all in our power. BEHAVE, or we’ll stop ordering books and let the lights go out! Alas, not much worldly status or wealth comes with the power to keep the Power on; maybe we’ll get our revenge by wiping your hard-drives…but the main thing is that some women really do go for us, despite the contrary myth.

Stop rambling – the Bookmarks! I’ve been buying and selling second-hand books for 35 years “How long?” 35 YEARS. Between the buying and the selling I do usually open the books to make sure there are words inside (describing the bookseller’s quick appraisal-scan technique would make another article), and sometimes there is a bookmark inside as well – if it’s doing its job, then that is where the book will open. I promptly take the bookmark out and KEEP IT! Why?, or perhaps Why not? The deep motivation is probably an adaptation selected by evolution, the desire to combat the general increase of entropy, as evidenced by stamp-collecting and the general desire not to throw anything away – Collecting as a thermodynamic strategy. Nearer the surface, I think I am fascinated by the window bookmarks afford on cultural history, on styles of commercial art, on fashions, on social movements. Should nothing else from our civilisation survive, you could reconstruct our entire way of life from them – maybe.

Now I’ve confessed. Maybe you will never grace these (many) steps again, preferring to frequent the (lesser) establishments of those more sporting booksellers who leave the bookmarks in. I have already been punished once for my cupidity, when I missed one of the most beautiful bookmarks I have ever seen, Victorian and in the shape of a champagne bottle, which a regular customer triumphantly showed me AFTER he had bought the book it was in, as if it wasn’t enough to be escaping with all our most precious volumes.

How many bookmarks have I accumulated? Ivan, our book-pricer, and I seem to fill a pocket file every few months, and after a year’s overfilling they get too thick for the filing cabinet and have to be stored somewhere else. I keep finding nests of these bulging files in odd corners of the house and shop, with labels like Bookmarks IV, 1983-85. Supposing I put aside only one bookmark a day (and we have a throughput of more like a hundred second-hand books a day) then that’s some 350 a year. Multiply by the aforesaid 35 years, or 49 times 25 times 10 if you are a mental arithmagician – and you come out with about 12,000. Is that a lot?? End to end they wouldn’t even stretch for a mile, let alone “to the moon and back”. Certainly no gull-infested EC Bookmark Mountain. At ten to the square foot, I could exhibit them on twelve hundred square feet of wall space; say 150 feet of eight-foot high wall, or around the walls of a single 50 foot by 25 foot room in a museum or art gallery. The Dave Mitchell Bookmarks Room. We could even do it in the shop – if I first got rid of the books. I can’t, so has any kindly curator out there a spare room in an art gallery? It would make a change from all that white space with a video, an arbitrary installation and a bored curator in the middle, like they do at the Arnolfini. Contemporary Art galleries do seem to follow in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen’s concept of Conspicuous Consumption – “Look how much expensive city-centre space we can afford to do nothing with.” Why not waste the space another way – by letting the Dave Mitchell Collection of Bookmarks see the toplight of day. The only expense would be blu-tack. Actually, no – displaying them without damage is a challenge, even if you are content to see just one side. It might be necessary to cut 12,000 holes of just the right sizes in several reams of card sheets.

If I can’t exhibit them, then what? Maybe I could get a Ph.D. bursary to study them. I already have a Ph.D. – are you allowed two? It would be nice to be a “Dr. Dr.”, I think they have them in Germany. Some Aspects of the Unwitting Testimony of the Bookmark? Certainly bookmarks do constitute a witness to social life and its changing emphases. Lots of flourishing private and public organisations seem to think that they just haven’t made it if they are not, in addition to the TV programmes and the Books-of-the-Series, up there in bookmarks alongside the libraries, the margarine adverts and the anti-litter campaigns. I suppose that bookmarks can be viewed as moles, or sleepers or fifth-columnists, going to ground between the pages of quite unrelated and innocent books, ready to leap out and influence the unsuspecting reader at any time for centuries to come, books being a long-lived species (see our article on The Ecology of Books). Maybe the whole point of bookmarks is that there is no need to go to an exhibition; they are out there waiting to assail your eyes whether you like it or not, telling you to wash your hands, visit the citizens’ advice bureau or insure your life. Bookmarks – benign influence or virulent influenza? Yes, there’s definitely scope for a grant-application somewhere here, but I need classical scientific or medical terms for bookmark and bookmark-collection – any suggestions? Compilatus Libersignorum?

If all else fails, I suppose I could start slipping the old bookmarks back into new books – we have some 40,000 new volumes in stock, we could put a historic bookmark in nearly every one of them. Could be a good marketing stunt!

Phil’s Court Report: A Christmas Carol 2009?

A Derbyshire bookshop owner is facing what a judge has described as a lengthy jail sentence for breaching health and safety regulations involving his staff and customers.

Conditions at Scarthin Books of Cromford were described as Dickensian and worse than a Victorian workhouse.

Derby Crown Court heard how the eccentric owner Dr David Mitchell, 65, made staff risk their lives by climbing into a tiny cupboard above rickety ancient stairs to remove cardboard boxes for recycling and then haul them for miles across ice and snow to fill up his van.

One shop manager, Wendy Cooper, 59, broke her fingernail and suffered a fractured eyelash in the trek across the wilds of Derbyshire. Other staff suffered similar injuries.

Mrs Cooper told the court: “How can a woman of my age and in my condition expect to lump bloody great sheets of cardboard across treacherous roads and fields in the snow. It’s not on. But we’ve all suffered intolerable hardship and we are often made to carry out tasks which are in blatant breach of health and safety regulations.”

The court also heard how Mr Mitchell would walk through a shop full of customers wearing a cap and nightgown counting money and complaining that people weren’t spending enough. Customers were also subjected to constant obnoxious smells although, in his defence, Mr Mitchell said this was caused by cabbage cooking in the café.

John Pidcock, 84, the shop’s expert on rare books said he was often forced to work. On one occasion, he told the court, he fell through a window when he lost his balance while carrying boxes of books during gale force winds.

Guy Cooper, a manager at the bookshop for 119 years, said although Mr Mitchell allowed staff a day off at Christmas he made them work until midnight even though there were no customers after 6pm. “We mostly had to vacuum, polish and feed Dave’s chickens,” said Mr Cooper.

Defence barrister Barrel O’Laffs said his client, who pleaded guilty to 31 breaches of the Safety At Work Act, had not been able to make any improvements to the shop since buying it in 1974 because all profits went towards restoring a ruin in his garden.

“I know I didn’t have planning permission but it’ll look very nice when it’s finished. I know a very good builder who only charges me £5,000 a day.” said Mr Mitchell.

The judge Mr Justice Bertrams bailed Mr Mitchell to appear in court again in the New Year and told him “Unless you start looking after your staff, valuing them, making them warm and paying them a living wage you’ll go to jail for a very long time. It is clear throughout this case that you have also spent far too much money buying second hand books. This must cease.”

Mr Mitchell said he would try but the current economic climate meant he had difficulty feeding his own family because he had to maintain the shop’s stock.

Mr Mitchell admitted outside the court he had promised the staff a very large Christmas bonus for looking after the business while he went on sabbatical leave. “Unfortunately, it won’t be as big as they think” he said. “Oh, and a Merry Christmas to all my customers.”

The Good Ship Scarthin

Composed by the Lewd Lady of Church Lane for Christmas 2008

The Waves (and Grumblings in the Fo’c'sle) seem to have risen higher since The Ballad of Scarthin Books of Yesterchristmas

Well, here we are again, dear friends,
At Scarthin’s Christmas do,
Despite the fact that finances
Are deeply in the poo.

We brush aside the credit crunch,
Shrug off the Wall Street crash,
For we, the cabin staff and crew
Are clearly on the lash.

Our skipper squints myopically
At his aperitif,
Then smiles a happy, gappy smile,
For he’s mislaid his teeth.

He’s always losing something,
Like cheque-book, specs and bag,
But when the timbers resonate,
We know he’s lost his rag.

He steers us blindly into storms
And battens down the hatch,
Yet still the bilges fill with dross
That we just can’t dispatch.

Our pilot on the poop deck
Peers through his telescope;
No orders in the offing, help!
There is no bloody hope.

“We’re doomed, we’re doomed”, his Guyness moans,
“No time to fiddle-faddle;
For, methinks, that we are up
Shit Creek, without a paddle.

“What say we mount a mutiny
Proclaiming UDI,
Stick head honcho on a raft
To do a Captain Bligh?”

“No, no, calm down”, his good wife soothes,
“We have to ride the storm.
We’ve got the crew to do it, see,
There’s brains, you know, and brawn.

“Our purser, for example, has
A very high IQ;
He’s also big on other things,
Like dumplings, cake and stew.

“He’s magic with the sextant
Punctilious with the log,
And when the yardarm has been passed,
He dishes out the grog.

“He is a cognoscente,
And for our benefit
Displays his erudition. Yes,
He is a shining wit.

“First Mate Phil’s a bonzer bloke,
A wizard at the wheel;
He trims the sails and tries to
De-barnacle the keel.

“But Captain and Commander
Loves the little sods;
He thinks it’s quirky to display
Moth-eaten gastropods.

“So, under cloak of darkness,
Phil and Bosun Dave,
Scrape the little buggers off
Into an unmarked grave.

“The bosun’s into teddy-bears,
But otherwise he’s sound;
He’ll always fly the flag for us
And never get us drowned.

“He whistles all of us aboard,
Diverts us with a jig,
Performs the sailor”s hornpipe,
Then slopes off for a cig.

“Our not-so-ancient mariner
Stoppeth one of three
And buyeth books both old and rare
To swell his Ivanry.

“Full oft he sitteth on the deck
And telleth wondrous tales
That helpeth our poor matelots
Forget all their travails.

“There’s Orpheus, our Midshipman,
Who’s musical to boot.
He can quell the raging storms
By plucking on his lute.

“We’ll send him up the ratlines,
And say, “Now Mr Hunt,
If you can pacify the waves,
‘Twould be a cunning stunt!”

“The rest are able seamen,
Jolly tars all told;
There’s Plimsoll Pam and Jaunty Jen
Though they are getting old.

“They’ll never climb the mizzenmast
Nor do the crow’s nest thing.
Perhaps they’re just some jetsam that
Himself can safely sling!

“And then, my love, there’s me as well,
Supporting, never faltering,
I keep a tight ship and ensure
The seamen aren’t revolting.

“I supervise the cargo and
Facilitate the freight.
Just like Magellan, I was born
To circumnavigate.

“I’m good at all things nautical,
Can tie a mean Turk’s head,
But when I splice the mainbrace, well
My two cheeks flush bright red.

“And don’t forget the cabin staff
That scrubs this Ship of Fools,
Nor, of course, the galley slaves
Led by our precious Joolz.

“With meagre rations they knock up
Comestibles so fine,
Like onion bargee, baked lascar
And schooners full of wine.

“And, so, you see, dear husband mine,
Despite their many faults,
You’ll never find a better band
Of jolly jacks and salts.

“They’ll guide us through the tempests,
They’ll nurse our creaking craft,
They’ll do it all for peanuts,
Because, thank God, they’re daft!

“As for the ship in which we sail,
Our listing, leaking lugger,
If it collapses then ‘twould be
A veritable bugger.

“With decks held up by acro-jacks
And timbers like a sieve,
The chances are it will implode
And none of us will live.

“So, what’s the point of worrying
Have faith in props and crew;
We’ll reach the harbour then we’ll start
The whole charade anew!”

At that the pilot smiled and said,
“Each shipmate is my mucker,
And as for you, my darling wife,
You’ve always been my succour.

“Together we will plough the main
And grapple with the gales,
We’ll even shoot an albatross
If it improves our sails.

“So, Merry Christmas to us all
Aboard the Scarthin Boat,
May Santa Claus bring gifts enough
To keep us all afloat!”

The Scarthin Slug-Moat

The Scarthin Slug-Moat (Slugmoat)

Is the moat leaking? Has the hot sun evaporated all the water? Has it subsided at one corner, leaving the opposite corner dry? Have wilting leaves bridged the barrier? Are there actually slugs and snails trapped inside the perimeter? Has a heron taken the goldfish? These are some of the worries of the carrot castellan.

A Snail’s Pace

Snail-racing is an old Scarthin tradition. As snails (and slugs) are difficult to direct, we race then outwards from the centre of a sort of Darts Board with successive circles at 10, 15, 25 cms. etc. The fit snail can easily manange 10cms. per minute from a slimey start, getting up to a maximum speed of some 15cms. per minute, though a certain randomness in direction finding reduces the average cross-country range to no more than 5 cms., or two inches, per minute. On warm, damp Spring nights, when slugs and snails do their worst damage to the horticulturalist’s newly-emerging tender shoots, these predators have at least six hours of bird-free darkness in which to make it to their munching grounds and back, giving them a range of some 180 X 5 cms. – about 9 metres or 30 feet. A farmer can, perhaps, afford to lose much of the productivity of such a belt around the margins of a 2-acre field, a hundred yards across, but unless a gardener’s plot is more than 60 ft. square, measuring from the nearest hedge, wall, shrubbery or uncultivated path, then the slugs and snails will meet in the middle. One muggy night in May or early June and every delicious infant carrot will have been nibbled to the ground.

When a problem is almost insoluble, there will be many solutions – think of the Doctor’s proven Cures for overweight, for arthritis, forgetfulness, cancer, melancholy or laziness – particularly when conventional medicinal magic bullets are distrusted. Even I, a classic pre-1968 square, scientific-optimist-Black’s-of-Greenock-Anorak eschew the magic bullet of the slug-pellet, having been told that birds will eat the victims and be poisoned in turn, but I refuse to turn to the alternative medicine of beer traps, milk traps (for those who don’t like wasting beer) or barriers of soot, sand, lime, crushed egg-shells or double-whammy combinations of the above. Nightly expeditions with torch and tin-can can be very effective in reducing the depredations of the wolfing-packs. In my hot youth, I used to hurl my catch over the roof of an adjoining bungalow, blissfully ignorant of their fate, or that of any passers by. Nowadays I self-righteously heave them into the woods or onto a neighbour’s wilderness. But can I keep it up over a wet Summer of rampant weed-cover like those of 2007 and 2008? Just one night missed, as with fox-and-hens or caterpillars-and-cabbage, can result in irretrievable loss. Sometimes I mark captured snails with white or fluorescent tippex (getting hard to find) before lobbing into the wild. This allows the statistician to make some estimate of the total snail population, as well as measuring their mobility.

In the absence of slug-pellets, old wives masquerading as gurus crowd in – beer traps, milk traps (for those who don’t like wasting beer) or barriers of soot, sand, lime, crushed egg-shells or double-whammy combinations of the above are advocated but are tedious to install, can vanish in a night’s heavy rain and are at best only partially effective. My preferred solution requires capital expenditure but is then almost maintenance-free and has a working lifetime of years, perhaps decades. It is the SCARTHIN SLUG-MOAT (or for Google’s Sake SLUGMOAT).

A four-metre length of four and a half inch (yes, the imperial measure survives in the width, but not in the length) half-round black or grey plastic guttering will cost you about �10. If you buy two of these, plus two two-metres lengths and four corner joining pieces, the total should be about �40 and, after a thumb-straining struggle to join them up you have the Slug Moat enclosing an area of eight square metres at a capital cost of �5 ($9 for international readers) per square metre. Of course, the cost arises from the linear scale of the boundary, while the area is proportional to the square of this. A hectare could be enclosed by four hundred metres of gutter and still only four corners at a cost of no more than a thousand pounds, a cost of 10p (18c) per square metre. In the Fenlands of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, most fields are surrounded by water-filled dykes, so if draw-bridges and tractor-washes were installed it should be possible to render both the slug and snail extinct over large areas, thus restoring the state of affairs achieved, according to Bede, by the prayers of St. Guthlac of Crowland in the seventh century. Bede recounts the saint’s perigrinations around the settlement of Snaildyke but the site of this is now lost.

My aims are however more modest. Most gardens are not as flat as the fens, so the first need is to level the site, the partially-filled moat acting as its own spirit-level. Otherwise one end or corner may need to be raised on an earthen bank where erosion will produce gaps under the guttering through which the shape-changing slug can intrude itself. The second need, in hot dry weather, is for regular topping-up every couple of days, or a dry bridge may be formed. I have surprised the occasional particularly intrepid snail ducking its way through a shallow section, rather like a caver forcing a short sump! I have experimented by submerging snails on the inside of a bucket. The snail will leave its shell safely stuck to the side, but will emerge and questingly extend upwards. It will escape and survive so long as its extreme proboscis-end – and they are good at stretching themselves – can emerge above the water-line and reattach itself. The rest of the body and the shell (which cannot re-stick under the water-line) are then hauled up to safety. You can’t help but applaud. As a result of some natural occurrences of this experiment, there may be an evolutionary trend in our showery climate towards a ducking-ability in snails and slugs. At least they don’t yet swim. This hypothetical amphibious tendency does mean that the interior of the slugmoat should be swept for intruders regularly. You do not want to trap them INSIDE. In the warmth of even a wet Summer, insects will deposit eggs in the moat, which may become a seething soup of larvae and a significant source of midges. One solution is to introduce small goldfish to consume the eggs and larvae. Hence the final theoretical problem of defence against the HERON – a bizarre consequence of the defence against arthropods that I rather hope one day to encounter, and to which even I have not yet imagined the solution. DJM Sept.08

Cistercian Cricket

Page under Re-development following Accidental Demolition

Cistercian (or Castle) Cricket – Sample Rules

I am personally a student of architecture and fascinated by mediaeval history, but I would no more want to inflict these wet interests on my family than I would want to sing madrigals in a pub bar. So when we go exploring ruins, it is with three main possibilities in mind – firstly to look for a memorable spot for a picnic, secondly to play hide-and-seek or one-two-three-out (Llanthony Priory or Bury-St-Edmunds Abbey ruins are good for that) and thirdly to have a game of soft-ball family cricket. The latter is always possible on unmanned sites but may require some cunning and discretion on “pay-to-get-in” sites, usually run by English Heritage, Cadw or Historic Scotland. There is no problem on ramifying sites such as Fountains Abbey, where there is lots of room and privacy beyond the East End of the Church or at castles where the defenses are still high enough to hide large parts of the Bailey from the Visitor Centre. The most delightful site for picnic and cricket I have found is Llawhaden Castle in Pembrokeshire, a classic Ministry of Worksed castle, with close-clipped green lawns surrounding high fragments of walls, towers, gatehouse and some other lower buildings, all surrounded by a dry moat and too out of the way to need more than a tiny carpark, and, mercifully, unmanned and open all year. Here the batsman can loft the ball into the moat, through high, yawning windows or into a ruined staircase. The ricochets are mutiple and baroque! Down through the woods in the valley of a little river is a classic ancient Pembrokeshire church, with its potential tower of refuge. As for Hide and Seek, by the way, the best two castles I know are Warkworth in Northumberland and The Little Castle at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire. The important characteristic is that each of the several floors of these castles are linked by more than one flight of stairs, so that the hiders can move up, down and across, and the seeker know he/she must employ second-guessing, re-searching of already-searched corners and frequent doubling-back to have any chance of catching someone. Once there are TWO seekers, it becomes possible to close in on the remaining hiders, but at Warkworth, the complexity can still be used to great effect! Ah! Those days! Anyway, here, at last are some sample Rules of Family-and-Friends Cricket – TRIBAL cricket, at its best.

1. The ball shall be bouncy
2. There shall be only one batsman at a time
3. The umpire, if any, will have no authority
4. The stumps being against a wall, there need be no wicketkeeper
5. The bowler shall be related to the batsman
6. The pitch being in a secluded part of the lawns, there need be no interruption
7. Bowling is allowed, but chucking is encouraged
8. Runs are scored as usual, but in addition:
9. Any number of runs may be run
10. The batsman may also acquire merit by striking the ball into a window embrasure, turret, tower, dungeon, moat or undercroft
11. Especial merit accrues if the ball is struck into a garderobe
12. The batsman is out if the ball cannot safely be retrieved
13. The batsman is out if the ball cannot legally be retrieved
14. The batsman can be bowled out, stumped out or caught out
15. The batsman can be adjudged out by general acclamation
16. Catches count, and attract special merit if the ball has ricocheted off any wall, staircase, buttress or other stonework not adjudged to be the ground
17. The game goes on until all are hungry, exhausted, bored or chased off by the custodian
18. The game will be memorable

Beach Cricket


The rules of Cistercian Cricket apply, except as follows:

1. The stumps being in the middle of featureless sands, there shall be a wicketkeeper
2. The wicketkeeper must be prepared to run a long way
3. The fielders must be prepared to run even further
4. There is no custodian
5. The participation of strangers cannot and should not be avoided
6. The fielding side may not dig extra holes in the wicket
7. When mothers or girlfriends bat, the field shall crowd in menacingly
8. When fathers, big brothers, or (especially) boyfriends bat, the field shall retreat respectfully
9. Children are rarely declared out
10. The sea is within the boundary of the ground
11. The players may agree that the sea can catch the ball (assuming the ball floats)
12. The incoming of the tide shall not stop play
13. The last man in (the sea) is the winner
14. Beware of flying bats

An irrelevant but strongly-felt P.S.:

Facilities: There are no facilities at this site other than the hotel. A direct quote from the Brecon Beacons national Park page on Llanthony Priory.

I can’t let this mean-minded bureaucratic entry go un-derided. And that is my more polite second draft. I know what it is like to be a PRIVATE enterprise providing an unsubsidised public cultural service free-of-entry-fee while being ignored in the publicly-funded literature. It must be said that the Wikipedia article also fails to convey the unique appeal of Llanthony. This ruin has ALL the facilities you could possibly desire! (but ware opening times out of season) In particular, a vaulted mediaeval underground bar from which you can bring up your beer or your coffees, and lemonade and crisps for the children, and sit with your back against the transept wall in the westering sun while the children chase each other among the pillars. Nearby is a campsite; you can book an evening meal or bed-and-breakfast at the hotel; the arches of the Nave frame the moor-topped hills that bound this deep and winding valley and among which are the most wonderful (if muddy) walks and cycle- or horse-rides. There are other Wonders in and near this valley, Cwmyoy Church in particular, and see our pubs page. And there are TWO loos on hand. This Pub in an Abbey is of course an anomaly; no doubt Cadw would like to close the one off from the other and dowse the joy of experiencing mediaeval hospitality – just as English Heritage have managed to kill the experience of visiting a Castle in a Farmyard that used to entrance (can that be right?) the visitor to Wingfield Manor, near us in Derbyshire. For more than ten years I have been visiting the Vale of Ewyas annually. It neither withers nor thrives excessively and each return is a joy and a relief, though this year the Min. of Ag. bureaucrats had managed to outlaw camp fires. End of mini-diatribe. DJM Nov. 09