Thursday 5 June 2008

Bookish

It was my irregular book club night tonight, celebrated with much wine and a remarkably unified set of opinions over our latest book (Death At Intervals by José Saramago). The consensus seemed to be that the idea was great, but that we weren't keen on the execution - we prefer some punctuation, and possibly some actual characters. But the man has a Nobel Prize for Literature so who are we to judge?

Still feeling literary afterwards, I spent a pleasant, slightly tipsy hour wandering around Borders on Oxford Street, refreshing my list of books to read in the near future, and enjoying the fact that they were playing Leonard Cohen (two weeks to the concert!). Books are such things of joy to me. I'm sure I'd go without food sooner than give up buying books (but please don't test me on that). My family are the same - growing up, even if pocket money was being withheld for whatever reason, I could always persuade my parents to buy me a book, because every parent wants their child to enjoy reading. Their problem was more how to punish me, as being sent to my room, my place of books, was no hardship to me - I was there anyway most of the time. Forcing me to go outside and climb a tree would have been far worse...

I was somewhat sad to visit the craft section and see the following:


Books everywhere, piled haphazardly on shelves, and all over the floor in such disarray. Why? I can't believe that the shop assistants have particular disregard for this section. I can only imagine that overenthusiastic crafters get so book-happy that they spend hours poring over them and don't put them back properly. So my dears, if you're reading this, please put them back nicely, OK?

Incidentally, not that this happened tonight, and not that I need it these days, but Borders on Oxford Street is one of the prime pulling locations in central London in my opinion. The number of times I've been approached by nice young men in there whilst I've been browsing... Far more often than in any other location. This seems to be particularly prevalent if I'm sat reading in the science section - clearly geeky men (I love geeks, I am one) need to establish that their quarry can actually read long words before they move in. Oh, and Borders have fairly alright, free loos, which is always a plus. If only I could live in a bookshop... I'd probably be even more happy imprisoned in one than in a yarn shop, which is saying something.

Last night our Wednesday night knitting group had an outing to the Etcetera Theatre in Camden, to where Tingles has "run away to join the theatre", as I keep putting it. You go, girl! The play was The Pilgrimage of the Heart, featuring a somewhat startling incest-based storyline. Ting, aka Tina, was fantastic - sweetie you absolutely made me forget that we normally see you grinning at us over a set of DPNs! I'll say again for future nights: break a leg!

2 comments:

Denise said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Denise said...

I didn't know Border's was now in the UK - always been one of my favourite places - our weekly SnB used to be in a local Border's until we outgrew the place. I have to stop myself going in there though as I have a huge stack of to-be-read books getting bigger every year...
Re: good places to pull - a friend of mine was almost followed out of the place once by an assistant who went all gaga over here when he saw she was buying The Simarillion!

(PS. previous comment removed as it contained an embarassing number of typos...)