We are on the shady side of the street, at least where the weather is concerned. Consequently we get about half an hour of sun directly on the window for a few days and only in high summer. 

This means I can display loads of wine in the window without worrying too much that it will be spoiled. One or two have labels or capsules that are not photo-stable so, even in indirect sun, they fade. It doesn’t affect the wines. I know that because I have to drink them.

I don’t put spirits in the window anymore. I did once, but someone took a large coping stone off the church wall and hefted it through the window. They took a bottle of vodka and ran off. We lost a bottle of gin, too, but I suspect that was an opportunist noticing a large hole and helping themselves because they took time to rearrange the other bottles. 

The Montrachet and vintage port was untouched but the insurance bill was still around £3,500. To replace the glass, from the inside, the whole window bed needed removing and replacing by a carpenter. He also made me some shelves for the shed out of the eye-wateringly expensive chipboard the police had ordered.

We don’t change the window as often as we should, other than leaning in and swapping the odd bottle. It is simply too difficult: it requires a set of steps and two people, one of whom must be a contortionist. Despite that, we did have a complete change-around recently. Not because it was getting tired and cobwebby but because Mrs P wanted to put carpet in the conservatory at home.

I have two lemon trees which are my pride and joy. They live outside in the summer but as it starts to get a bit nippy I like to bring them in. This year they had put on a growth spurt and were no longer allowed indoors. The obvious answer was the shop windows where they just about fit at either end. Anyone who has manhandled a heavy pot with a vigorous lemon tree into a small space will know that they have long, sharp thorns. Despite the blood, I was quite happy with the result. The only other casualty was one small branch containing a large, ripe lemon. When life gives you lemons, drink gin and tonic. So I did.

Both windows have a bed of hundreds of corks. Someone once asked where I got them all from. I must have looked a bit sheepish because they instantly realised. 

Our window displays always feature Champagne and larger-sized bottles of, mainly, claret. In addition we have various wines we want to show off, sometimes with a regional theme. At one point we utilised the ceramic stiletto bottle holder which had been produced to promote Côtes du Rhône. An entitled lady burst into the shop and demanded that I show her different colour options in a size seven as she required some shoes for a wedding. If she had realised, being surrounded by wine, that she was in a wine shop and not a shoe shop, she evidently decided to brazen it out but eventually stormed out muttering, “well, you have one in the window!” We have dead wasps too, madam.

You would think that it is self-evident that a window display should show off what you are about. It is, after all, your “shop window”. It is surprising, then, that people have suggested I put all sorts of things in it other than wine. OK, and lemon trees. 

From time to time someone in town decides we should have a window-dressing competition and it inevitably has to have a theme. On one occasion the theme was simply “Blue”. I tried to excuse myself. I explained to the organiser that I would struggle to fill two largish windows with blue stuff. For some reason very few wine labels are blue. She stomped around the shop and triumphantly pointed to a pack of low-calorie tonic water, “There!” she said. “Why don’t you just put lots of that in the window?” I escorted her off the premises without the need to answer. 

One Christmas the theme was “Victorian”. A friend’s artistic wife offered to do one of the windows as a set of A Christmas Carol with appropriate present tags for various characters. Her artistic endeavours were frustrated by my insistence that anything displayed should be stuff I wanted to sell and had in stock. We got there in the end, with a few compromises. Tiny Tim was to receive a double magnum of claret whether he liked it or not. Scrooge was a bit more difficult. The ghosts’ gifts were probably inappropriate and my stated policy of not having spirits in the window went unappreciated. 

It looked quite professional eventually and included Victorian-style window panes fashioned from black tape. It was only in January that I realised permanent tape had been used, so it remained a feature for another 18 months.

We often have “spot the odd one out” competitions too. The idea is that people will go around studiously looking in every window – but the people who enter into the spirit are generally still in primary education. Occasionally a sniffy organiser will exclude me for that reason. I point out that they are usually accompanied by an adult. 

My entry is normally a tin of Brasso amongst the wine bottles and appropriate props. It’s surprising how many people don’t notice. One young girl once proudly announced she had spotted the odd one out. “It must be that ear trumpet!” she told her mum. I had to rush out and correct her. “I think you will find that is a Georgian silver decanting funnel.”