Secondhand bookshops are by their very nature a little odd , tugging at the rubber sheet of reality is the nearest I can get to this, something along the lines of it’s the proprietors job not to notice the function too closely, so the right books appear at the right time for the right people.As we sail, seemingly without any map, into a brave new world where there are far fewer secondhand bookshops, I am trying to come up with something that could redefine this type of shop so that it could still function beyond the paperless book and the internet.
A further thought here is what would be the effect on humanity lo live in rooms without books, the knowledge stored but in digital form, no paper no ink no sewing no binding?
The first thing I look at when I go into someone’s home is their books, without them, well I just don’t know, I shall digress.
Sitting behind the desk in the bookshop with a large cup of tea in a cup that says I love coffee on it, I find myself confronted by some of the many bizarre questions raised by life.
Somehow during a shortage brought on by Christmas, snow, truth is I don’t really know, we seem to have toilet paper with a pattern on it. Who would devise such a thing, I can’t really imagine, every time you use it you first think you are the victim of some strange internal disease. It is only when the hypochondria subsides into the back of your mind and you realise that you have been caught once again, that temporary relief from hypochondria flood sin.
I am the type of person who believes that acupuncture works by making it hurt more somewhere else and therefore directing your mind away from the problem, all that eastern mystical cure resolved into - if you stamp on your toe your ear will stop hurting, assuming you had earache in the first place.
The taking away of a malady that didn’t exist in the first place, well it is some strange area in the sensation of personal ill or wellbeing.
Staying on the mystical plane for a moment I was contemplating how the god of atheists would work, based on the principle that any gods existence is based on the sum of human belief. There must be a deity something like the square root of minus one in the god bothering world, presumably not bothered at all.
Another strange thing that came out of the festive season is my new jumper, this seems to be made of the wool equivalent of Velcro and everything sticks to it.
There is an upside to all of this too, the chef Toby rushed out of Age & Son to give my children petites madeleines in deference to Marcel Proust, this is to do with associations and the meaning of flavour perhaps.
