Diary of a Shopkeeper, 9th August

Cleanliness is next to cheesiness.

Before I was a shopkeeper, I worked for four years as a janitor for Edinburgh District Council, initially at the bandstand in Princes Street Gardens. Except we weren’t allowed to call it that. Our boss had dreams of getting the place taken seriously as a venue for high-profile performances, so she insisted on calling it The Ross Theatre, which she thought sounded more impressive. Several times a day the phone would ring. ‘Hello, Ross Theatre,’ I’d say.

‘What?’ would come the reply. ‘Where?’

‘The bandstand in the gardens.’

‘God’s sake, why didn’t you just say that?’

As well as locking and unlocking, setting up for visiting acts, and taking tickets at the gates, our main job was cleaning. There were toilets and a dressing room below the stage, and there was the concrete bowl of the seating area, set into the grassy slope below Princes Street. Back then it was perfectly okay to smoke during the shows, and lots of folk did. Our boss hated this, especially the hundreds of cigarette ends that would litter the place afterwards. Our first job in the morning was to go around the whole amphitheatre picking them up.

‘I don’t want to see a single butt anywhere!’ our boss would say, and she’d spend twenty minutes every afternoon checking to see if we’d missed any. If we could’ve swept them up it would’ve been easy, but they were always underneath and inbetween the plastic chairs, and there was no way to get in about with a brush. Picking them up one by one was the only way.

Cleanliness is next to cheesiness.

Eventually I moved on to a permanent contract as janitor of a village hall on the outskirts of the city. Again there was locking and unlocking, building maintenance, and meeting and greeting anyone who’d hired the place. There were regulars like the playgroup and Scottish Slimmers, and occasional specials like jumble sales, blood donor days, and weddings. I liked weddings and dances, because they meant I got overtime, but the downside was the amount of cleaning required afterwards. The playgroup might spill sand out of their sandpit, or drop poster paint on the floor, but a quick sweep or mop would fix that. After weddings there was rubbish everywhere: crumpled cans, drifts of confetti, discarded paper plates from the supper, not to mention sticky beer spills, petals from bouquets tramped into the floor, and squashed raisins from the wedding cake. Worst of all were the toilets. As this is a family diary, I won’t go into details, but let’s just say…no, let’s not say anything.

Cleanliness is next to cheesiness.

The best bit of the cleaning was the big orange rotary cleaner. It was like a giant hoover with a circular brush on the bottom that spun around with enormous force and polished the floor. It was so powerful that I had to use all my strength to stop being flung across the floor as I birled up and down the hall. I hadn’t been properly trained in the use of such dangerous machinery. In fact I hadn’t been trained at all. The hall lay 10.1 miles away from the council offices. Council managers had a maximum petrol allowance of 10 miles each way, so they never came to see me. In four years at the hall I only saw my manager four times, when he visited on his annual mission to empty the 2p and 5p coins from the pay phone in the lobby. I suppose the income from that justified the extra 0.1 miles of petrol each way.

Maybe it’s because of this personal history that I particularly enjoyed Post-it Notes from Underground, by Simon Crump, which is the funniest, strangest novel I’ve read in years. Simon the main character seems close to Simon the author. Both wrote books about Elvis, both worked as academics, and both performed heroically in the campaign against the illegal felling of 17,000 street trees by Sheffield City Council. It was the arrests of the Simons for their part in these (ultimately successful) protests that led to them losing their jobs, and having to find alternative employment. So it was that they found themselves working as minimum-wage, early-morning cleaners in an electronics factory.

Simon in the novel says it’s the best job he’s ever had, and it’s easy to understand why. It’s hard but useful work that has a clear goal: when the place is clean the job is done. His fellow cleaners are tolerant of his quirks, supportive in times of trouble, and appreciative of his sometimes bizarre humour. He has a talent for getting into strange situations: making friends with a pheasant called Derek, pushing a frozen woodpecker down his trousers, and arguing with his boss who leaves cryptic post-it notes every morning, and who insists the air tastes better at Flamingo Land. Simon the author has a talent for writing about mundane reality in a way that makes it weird and wonderful, hilarious and heartwarming. It’s a rare record of life as millions live it, but that’s rarely reflected in a work of fiction.

Post-it Notes from Underground is published by Blue Moose Books, and is available from local bookshops. It deserves to sell more copies than Lynsey Queen of Clean.

And now I must go and mop the floor and disinfect the fridges. Cleanliness is next to cheesiness.

Post-it Notes from Underground is definitely available from Stromness Books & Prints - I saw it in the window. (Call them on 01856 490302.) I’m sure The Orcadian Bookshop could order it for you too. Is it available online? Of course it is, but I don’t want to encourage that kind of behaviour when we have two good bookshops to enjoy.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 13th August 2026. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.