Working today on what should be my day off as the boss is on holiday. Got up, left Julia sleeping, scrambled some eggs, ate them out of the pan (I soon revert to bachelor mode when my wife is out of sight) and set off.

She texted later and told me I appear to have trained her well as her first act on coming downstairs was to make two cups of tea and put mine down by the side of my chair. Trained? I seriously doubt it. After thirty years I have given up asking and just accept that despite my pleas she will never learn to leave my stuff where I put it, or replace the remote control in the same place each time so we know where it is when we need it.

We had several sets of visitors in the shop, several who had made appointments and several who hadn’t. I can forgive the latter, apart from the ones who know we like them to ring ahead. The one that really annoyed me was the one who knew he should have rung ahead, and complained it was a wasted journey, as he wanted to see the owner. If only he had rung for an appointment he would have saved the disappointment. That’s one of the reasons we run an appointments system.

Political skit note (obverse)

The truth is that these days we are internet based. We took the decision because that’s how most customers are these days. We actually have people in Nottingham, including some within a mile of the shop, who would rather browse or eBay site (and pay postage) rather than come in the shop.

We had someone come in yesterday to sell us some coins. He had made an appointment but he didn’t really need one because he knew more about coins than we did. He had learnt it off the internet over the previous week. All his coins were worth more than we offered, which is true, because we have to pay rent, rates, electricity and , most importantly, staff to deal with idiots. At the end of a traumatic hour my workmate was worn out and completely depleted in tact. At the end, the customer told him that we should alter our website as the directions provided were very poor and one of the roads was closed.

Now, those directions were not provided by us, ours are accurate. He’d used Google and the postcode and when we’d discussed it the day before I had told him the Google route was wrong and provided him with simple and correct directions. He had clearly decided to ignore me.

A lesser man may well have put their head round the door (I was hiding in the back) and reminded him that I had told him to ignore Google and follow my directions, but I decided merely to grind my teeth in case he decided to discuss it and stay even longer. Some people are beyond help.

Political skit note (reverse)