Temple Cloud

Since February this year, I have been working in the Sue Ryder shop in Shepton Mallet.   Over the last few years, my emotional stability hasn’t been up to keeping a job.   I had been enjoying working in Shepton Community Bookshop , but after I started an argument about the theology espoused in one of the books in the religion section, and frightened a customer, I wasn’t asked to come back. So it is a mark of how much my sanity has improved that I have managed to stick with Sue Ryder and another voluntary job (washing cups at the Oakleaf Community Café ) without storming out after an argument with my boss.   Once I had learned not to take my role too seriously, I could stop worrying about my boss’s insistence on arranging children’s books by spine colour rather than by author or theme or age group, and just enjoy the pretty rainbow pattern of the books. One point that working in a shop has forcefully driven home to me is how crazy the calendar of retail is.   I had already been awa