Crikey

At lunch time today, an email came in from a consultancy who offer to set you a questionnaire for personnel so you can judge their mood swings and ability to cope under pressure.

Well, I assessed my morning's work which was paying royalties, and decided that the normal annoyances of finding envelopes, statements, checking some addresses on the web and countless other small tasks was bound to make one slightly grumpy. But I was coping OK.

Then - the phone rings and a lovely independent bookshop calls to tell me they are selling books for an event that involves one of our authors. They asked for 5 copies on sale or return, which I said fine to. But they did not want to order them because they wanted to return them the very next day - and I apologised but said I was not going to manage to deliver and then return to the shop to collect unsold books the next day - I mean two hours journey twice over for a possible profit of a tenner? And guess what - the bookseller just put the phone down on me!

Golly. I am so glad that lovely words like golly still exist.