Loaghtan Books

Our farming neighbour thinks that the finest May tree on the island stands outside our office.  He estimated that it's probably carrying at least a million blossoms.  It's a lovely tree, particularly at this time of the year. The Hawthorn, as it's more usually called, is traditionally thought to guard one of the gates to the realm of the little people, and is also considered as a protection against evil spirits.  In Celtic cultures - and the Isle of Man has a strong Celtic tradition - it is treated with particular respect, with gifts hung on the branches to propitiate the fairy guardians. Perhaps because the trees are thought to belong to the little people, in some areas it was considered very unlucky to bring hawthorn blossom into the house.  Or perhaps it was merely because the blossom looks spectacular but smells 'like death' if cut - almost literally.  The chemical in hawthorn blossom is the same one as is in bad meat.  It was also unlucky to cut hawtho...

  As many of you know, the Tower of Refuge stands on Conister Rock in Douglas Harbour.  The rock is sneaky in that it lies just underneath the water when the tide is in.  Boats which don't know the waters - and a few which do - have been known to ground or even wreck on Conister Rock.  The Tower of Refuge acts as a marker so that skippers of incoming boats know where the rock is. The Tower is usually only accessible by boat, and then only by boats whose occupants know what they're doing and have permission to do it.  However, at Spring tide it's just possible to walk to the Tower, if you don't mind getting your feet wet.  The walk is organised by the RNLI (its founder, William Hilary, built the Tower) whose members supervise to make sure people don't do anything daft, or at least can be rescued if (when) they do do daft things. Last Thursday was the day, and getting on for two thousand people enjoyed the unusual sunshine (remember that large round yellow th...

Pictured above is His Excellency Sir John Lorimer, Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man, and King Charles' representative on Mann. Yesterday Loaghtan Books was honoured by a visit from Sir John and Lady Lorimer. ....... The King's representative came here. Here. ARGH! His visit was of course a huge honour, but it did bring with it some difficulties.  As our delivery drivers will testify, vehicular access to the office is, frankly, awful.  While I was sure that His Excellency's driver could cope, I had visions of the official limousine getting scraped on our famously hostile hill. Tentatively I suggested to Sir John's PA that he and Lady Lorimer might arrive on the Manx Electric Railway, and we would meet them at the Dreemskerry tram stop.  Rather to our surprise, they not only came on the MER but on an ordinary service tram.  Good for them!  In Sir John's position he could have requested the Royal trailer, if not a 'Special', and it would of course have be...

Spring finally seems to have arrived, even though the sun has forgotten how to be warm.  With the spring has come some unusual visitors to the area around the Loaghtan Books office. Many of you know that the Isle of Man is home to a troop of wild wallabies, descendants of escapees from the Curragh Wildlife Park (our 'zoo').  The Wildlife Park is in the north west of the island, so most of the mob remain roughly in that area. Numbers have been growing of late, however, and some of these antipodean refugees have been venturing further afield.  Loaghtan Books is in the north east of the island and last year we saw the first signs of wallaby incursion.  The senior partner almost ran into one as he was walking up Dreemskerry Hill.  I'm not sure which was more startled. Incidentally, the collective noun for wallabies is a troop, mob or court.  Which you use obviously depends on what mood they're in.

One of the oddest questions retailers ask us is 'what's your minimum order?'. Well... one.  Of course. Obviously we can't sell less than one book; can you imagine it?  'Thank you for the part payment Bookshop X...' snip, snip, snip... 'here is a third of your book'.  Having said that I suppose you could arrange something like that with e-books, but, with one exception ( What Nobody Sees , if you're interested), we don't sell e-books. Come to think of it, books in bits are called serialisations, aren't they? Anyway, I know that some businesses do have a minimum order, but we take the view that the customer is (mostly) always right, so if retailers want one book, we sell them one book.  They can always come back for more, and we do offer discounts for bulk (hint, hint...)

It has been growing more and more difficult to do the work we needed to do on our ancient computer equipment, so we recently re-kitted ourselves. I almost wished we hadn't. Why do computer people change things so much?  I'd transferred all the files and gubbins from the old machine to the new one and just wanted to access them to continue work.  But how to find them?  Nothing looked the same, everything was in different places, and none of the icons looked like they used to. Tentative clicking brought up a box which invited me to personalise my experience.  What exactly does that mean?  If it's my experience surely it's personalised.   I just want to look at my files.   Another box popped up and explained excitedly how the screen was now something-or-other with extra graphic wotsits.  Presumably that's good. I just want to look at my files. A menu dropped down to explain that I could express my mood with different theme colours (what's t...

 The Mangelwurzel cutting carbon output.