Interesting people

Some days in the shop are just full of conversations with interesting people.
Today was a good one for that.
We started off with a lady who's learning Mandarin Chinese ("20% of the world's population speak it," she said).
Then there was a Mr Mayall, who may be related to the Mayall's of Hay's jeweller's shop. They're doing some research to find out.
Someone else who was doing research was looking for old maps of the area where their house is in Surrey. It's medieval, and they're trying to find out more of the history of the house.
Then there was the man who was looking for a half-remembered poem by Keats. "Old Meg she was a gypsy," he said.
"Meg Merrilees!" I said. Like him, I learned the poem at school. He was writing an article and wanted to quote from the poem, and didn't trust his memory. It's a good job he didn't - when he found a copy in an anthology, he found that he'd inserted a whole new verse about her little cook pot! But she did "make Mats of rushes, and sold them to the Cottagers, she met among the Bushes."
A girl who bought a book about living and working in Tokyo was about to go off and do just that, and a man who bought a book about Somerset showed me a picture of the house where he lived as a boy in it.
And finally there was the man who asked me to look in a dictionary of American Scholars for him. He'd forgotten his glasses and the print was tiny. He was looking for Elihu Yale, who founded Yale University (he wasn't mentioned in the book) and wanted to know more about him. Elihu Yale is buried in Wrexham churchyard, his home town, and my family lived in a village just outside Wrexham for many years, so I was able to tell him a bit more than he already knew. I've even visited the grave! (Very fine church - used to be one of the Seven Wonders of Wales on the early tourist trails).