Life is nothing but fun...

The main reason we went to Galloway was to visit The Book Shop in Wigtown. Wigtown is a pretty little place which has reinvented itself as a book town, with lots of second-hand bookshops and a Book Festival, which is happening shortly. 

The owner of The Book Shop - the largest one in Scotland, he says - is Shaun Bythell, who has now published two books about his experiences while running the shop: "Diary of a Bookseller" and "Confessions of a Bookseller". I would greatly recommend them - they're very funny, and it's also quite interesting (and sobering) to read what he says about the effect that Amazon has had on the book trade.

We follow him on Facebook (The Book Shop, Wigtown) and he posts funny videos set in the shop so it was SO EXCITING to be there.

On that vintage typewriter on the table is a piece of paper which says
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY

and there are various other admonishments and wry quotations posted around the shop.

I'm an avid reader of published letters and diaries so was very happy.

Shaun wasn't there, which was a minor disappointment, but we would have been much too shy to tell him how much we enjoyed his books and anyway, he can be very scathing (in his writing) about customers so we'd have had to be on our best behaviour. Which of course we were anyway, and bought lots of books. (Oh dear.)

Though we didn't meet Shaun, we did meet Captain the Cat, which was almost as good and less scary.

Yesterday we visited friends who took us to The Hill House, designed for the Blackie family by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and built from 1902-4. CRM was a wonderful architect from the artistic point of view but not so good on the practicalities, and the house is now, as the director of the Scottish National Trust says, "dissolving like an aspirin" because of various issues with the way it was built.

So a huge roofed cage has been built around it to keep the rain off till it dries out and then some lucky person will decide what to do about it.

The cage includes a walkway so that you can go up round the outside of the house and look down at it. This walkway is made of slatted metal so that you can see how far up you are, which is a bit AAAAAAAGH,  which is why my photos are mostly from lower down.

There's a nice view over Helensburgh to the sea.

Inside it's just the same as before, marvellously preserved with much of the furniture. Here's the sitting room...

and here it is a hundred years or so ago, with a ghostly Mrs Blackie reading her book. Well, the house has lasted longer than the people, so that's something.