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My favourite bookshop, where I spent many happy hours plonked on the floor among a pile of books, is no more. How can I replace this happy place?
Everyone has their happy place. For some, it's their childhood home. For me it was the fantasy and science fiction section of Borders bookshop on London's Oxford Street. I spent hours there with others of my ilk, muttering to ourselves as we pawed the latest novels by Liz Williams, Connie Willis and Diana Wynne Jones (RIP).
Borders is now a clothes shop. Before Borders I liked the art section of Books Etc in Covent Garden. Before that I liked the Dillons in Gower Street, where the staff were so clueless that when I asked for one of the founding texts of modern economics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, I was asked if I was sure I'd got the author's name right.
Then Amazon landed and everything changed, mainly for the better. But now I've hit a snag. In a move to further my political ambitions and infiltrate the UN as a cultural attache, I'm learning a few new languages, and I need some books to help me. I've just been in the West Bank in Palestine, speaking, reporting and doing outreach work. Seeing the checkpoints, with their signage in Arabic and Hebrew, has made me want to learn these unfamiliar alphabets and find out more about these two cultures so that I can answer back next time I'm screamed at by a teenage soldier.
Ordinarily I'd go to Borders, sit on the floor and leaf through all their stuff. I don't want to browse online, download things on a Kindle or tread carefully in the discreet smugness of Waterstones – I want a big book bunker where I can make a mess.
There was only one thing Borders was bad for: weirdos. I was accosted by one in the astrology section. I'd class him as a low-grade pest, threat level 3.5. He pointed at the shelves: "They play with your mind you know. They put messages in your brain." But isn't that what good books are meant to do?
