Books: delicious hot, disgusting cold

The Kilburn Bookshop closed forever on Sunday. I popped in and out almost every day last week, checking its pulse and scavenging for books. The atmosphere was funereal, the shelves got thinner and thinner, people dashed in saying 'Darling! Is this really the end?' and the guys at the till got weary of saying the same old things. Yes, we're closing. Yes, it's true. Yes, Amazon, the book trade, the rent hike...

To counter the despair, I thought I'd post a list of some of the books I came away with in the vulture-mobile/jalopy. These are books which will illuminate my life in years to come. There was a separate pile for Mr Q and for Pie, and some that I won't mention because they're presents; these are the ones I chose for me, myself and I.

• Burnt Diaries - Emma Tennant
• Selected Poems - Wallace Stevens
• The Complete Poems - Emily Jane Bronte
• Singing in the Dark - Alison Brackenbury
• Drives - Leontia Flynn
• The Broken Word - Adam Foulds
• The Forward Book of Poetry 2007
• Time Bites - Doris Lessing
• The Unknown Matisse; Matisse the Master - Hilary Spurling
• The Artist's Way - Julia Cameron
• Sign Language Companion - Cath Smith
• More About Boy - Roald Dahl
• The Jolly Postman - Janet & Allen Ahlberg
• Wizard of the Crow; A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o
• Catholicism - Gerald O'Collins
• The Child that Books Built - Frances Spufford
• Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell
• A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
• The Discovery of France - Graham Robb
• A Book of Silence - Sarah Maitland
• Speak, Memory; Glory - Vladimir Nabokov
• Revelations of Divine Love - Julian of Norwich
• The first person and other stories - Ali Smith
• On Beauty (audiobook) - Zadie Smith

The last is poignant. I'm listening to it at the moment and it mentions Kilburn, Zadie Smith's childhood stomping ground, giving me a warm glow on the inside when I hear mudane details of the houses round here and how far it is to the nearest tube stop. But it also reminds me of the article posted up in the window of the bookshop (from the Telegraph, Apoca-lit Now) in which I read that Zadie used to get books from the Kilburn Bookshop as a kid. Where would a young bookaholic go now?

Like when a pen is picked up and writes on its own

Oh yulp. I haven't written a post for almost a week so this is what you get, a piece of stream-of-conk drivel. Well, the sun is shining mutely but overpoweringly through grey cloud (single grey cloud over London, probably looks like a lumpy duvet when viewed from an aeroplane window) and as I write it is coming and going, glowing as strong as a lamp in a teenager's ganja farm - one minute - and fading in cold afterglow the next. Cars a-go-go mostly downhill towards town [as I call the City Centre] on Finchmore Road. Occasional pedestrians.

The yellow tulips on the table are in a parallel world, strange aliens. The Camden rubbish truck goes by. Two men: one in a baseball cap, one in a beanie - pause for a moment to imagine that for them they are the centre of their day, their path under my window is an ingrained track in their lives, for them all stories all songs centre on them. Not me, how strange!

A smart car has pulled up at the foot of the steps. The car has wing mirrors with their own indicator lights, wing mirrors that fold inwards under remote control. The Mercedes dreamcatcher on the front is snapped off, though; even smart cars must have faults.

A lady walks down the street in flip-flops (good luck to you madam, have you not seen the forecast in the Cloud over London?) and on the opposite pavement, in the opposite direction, a man pushes a buggy, causing me to wonder why why why, it always intrigues me - the story behind the man pushing the buggy.

May their ears fall off

The other day I was a total idiot, proof of the old adage that there's one born every minute. It took me the rest of the week to get over it, and I feel I have to tell people as a sort of penance. Think of me of The Ancient Mariner for Modern Times. The moral of the story is clear: don't answer the phone whilst trying to feed supper to a baby. Read all about my stupidity in the letter I fired off to The Guardian's consumer champion, Capital Letters, once I realised what a dolt I'd been!

Dear Capital Letters,

I had a run-in with a company called Studio London recently. They rang to congratulate me on winning a competition (which I couldn't remember entering) for a 'magazine-style photo shoot' and I gullibly went along with it, managing to drown out the sound of alarm bells going off as I gave them my bank details and authorised them to remove £40 from my account for a holding deposit (for a prize!). I then read up on the company on the internet and found to my horror that this was only the start of Studio London's machinations: people who actually went to the photo shoot wrote of parting with hundreds, even thousands, of pounds for a few photographs under the pressure of a 'hard sell' by the company.

Realising that I'd been conned, I contacted them the next day to cancel my booking and demand my money back. This they refused to do, saying that during the previous telephone conversation I would have been told about their 'no cancellations' policy. Their trump card seemed to be that all calls was recorded by them - the implication being that it was my memory versus their ellusive tape-recorder. They also attempted to guilt-trip me by saying that I had wasted one of their highly-prized bookings. Fortunately I was on my mettle by then, having already contacted Consumer Direct and received sound advice on my rights under the Distance Selling Regulations 2000.

Although the phone conversation came to a dead end (Me: I will get my deposit back. Them: I cannot confirm that you will. Repeat to fade) an email and a letter stating the law seem to have had the desired effect. I should be receiving the deposit I stupidly parted in the next 7-10 days.

Clearly I was a fool to get involved in the first place, vanity won out over wariness and cynicism, but I merely write because I want others to avoid my pratfall. I don't know if you need letters like this where there isn't an issue waiting to be resolved - except that there's a company out there still scamming people, that 's worrying enough.

Yours sincerely,
Q

Of course I put my name on it, I'm not totally loopy; I don't go round calling myself 'Q' in real life, like an MI5 agent, much as Mr Q would adore me if I did.

Beware...

... the Ides of March

Books

If there was one shop I'd recommend you go into on the High Road, it would be 'The Kilburn Bookshop', although of late it's been looking a bit down-at-heel. Now I know why. This lovely unassuming shop is to close at the end of the month. Why oh why? I've asked around and was told that the owner has been talking about winding things up for several years. This March is the end of the road. The good news could be that there is 30% off all stock - if that counts as good news.

How do the little tiddlers of the books industry survive? How on earth does an independent bookshop keep going these days? I know of three round here - West End Lane Books, The Willesden Bookshop and The Kilburn Bookshop - soon to be two. Now that my favourite is cutting its losses and closing its doors, I feel angrier than ever about the collapse of bookselling as it use to be and the 'net book agreement' (the ending of which led to, for instance, 'Harry Potter' being £15 cheaper in the big shops than the little ones). Only a fool would pay over the odds. I am one of those remaining fools and I can only say in my defence that fools (cf. Shakespeare) are sometimes credited with wisdom.

There are the second-hand bookshops, such as the ones I knew in Edinburgh as a student, which seem to get by on a budget of air and rolling tobacco. Perhaps they sell an expensive first edition once a year (on the internet of course) and that tides them over for the next year. Then there is Word Power on West Nicholson St, Edinburgh, which has always seemed to do a healthy trade to me - it's proximity to the university must help, but what really impresses me is that it has its own strong agenda (calls itself a Radical bookshop). This must count for something. Somewhere you can go and find unusual books that surprise and challenge you.

The other great bookshop from my university days was Barnardos on South Clerk St. This was, I suppose, the mirror-image of Word Power: it sold back to the public the books of which the academics had tired. The prices were fair for second-hand books, the variety was astounding. Many of my favourite books came from there. I still wish I'd bought a copy of Robert Alan Jamieson's 'A Day At The Office' I found there - it was a signed copy, though, and the inscription (a personal one) was to somebody else. Why had it ended up in a charity shop? I felt bad about buying it, so I didn't.

I'm not wholly against the bullies in the playground of bookselling - I would be a hypocrite to denounce Waterstones or Amazon, having bought books from both. You have to admire their clout. I also take the point made by many that their local bookshop before the advent of better was a terrible store with no inspiration, nothing new, nothing you wanted to read and one smelly dog in the corner. The local one in our hometown (once, back in those sepia days, regarded as a treasure trove of good books) now sells mostly DVDs and my parents resent the way the owners are always sitting in each others laps. If Posy Simmonds hadn't done so already (The Literary Life), I'd suggest she satirised the whole scene with her wicked cartoonist's pen.

Then there are the blogs, doing their bit for the extinction of the face-to-face bookshop encounter. If you want to include a link to a book you've mentioned (I know because I've done this already), you're almost bound to link it to Amazon, because that's the first that comes up, silly, and we don't have time to go one better (the whole of the Internet seems built upon the idea of being 'short of time' - though we had a lot more time before it arrived, I remember those halcyon days). There is even the readymade add-on that links books you mention directly to their Amazon page...

200 visitors and counting!

Eek, as teenage girls - and everyone else once they get high on bloxygen - say. I must be doing something seriously good here. Thank you all for visiting. It makes my day - when I'm not beating myself up about whether this is the most sublime and egotistical waste of time ever thought up. (It is).

Posh lollies, chocolate mice, acid drops, midget gems

Pie and I decided to go to the One O'Clock Club at Hampstead Heath today. It's a wonderful free-form resource provided by the City of London somewhere down the south edge of the Heath, near the prison-like Lido. I am grateful to the friend who recommended it to me ("many clubs are awful" she said "but this one is excellent").

To be basic about it, it is a sort of big shed or barn (with windows and heating) with lots of well-loved toys and areas for children to play. Pie is at the still blissful stage of being a lowly bum-shuffler and that relegates us to the Baby Corner where other 'non-walkers' and their parents/nannies ('pannies'?) loll around on beanbags and foam mats. Mr Pie spent a long time gripping the gate of the Baby Corner, uttering low bellows and attempting to insert his head between the bars. This seemed like superb entertainment to him.

On the way back the devil, on special lentish duty, tempted me and we got out at West Hampstead instead of Kilburn High Road. We'd been on the Overland, you see, letting the train take the strain. Opposite the station is a tiny shop, more of a serving hatch really, called Beatties Sweeties. I purchased 50 grams of chewy beer bottles (like 'cola bottles' but revolting: taste of beer swept off the brewery floor) and 50 grams of black'n'reds (significantly better but a curious 'two stage' sweet - get rid of the tiny sugar pellets before attaining the gummy core). All for £1.20. I admit my choices this time were off... it felt like a penance to eat them. But I like sweets. My poor molars are a testament to that.

Bankers hours

Something is playing merry havoc with the upkeep of the blog. At the moment I get up at five-thirty (I know, even writing that down makes me feel tired) to get my 'serious' writing done before Mr Pie awakes. This seems to work and my pen-and-paper writing has really come along - in quantity, I'll say nothing for quality - but it means that at the end of the day, after Pie has gone to sleep, when I settle down to play at writing in the blogosphere, I'm dog tired and can hardly dredge up the energy to type.

I was comforted to read this in an interview with Dave Eggers in yesterday's Observer Review:

"I used to write in the middle of the night. I suppose I was surprised by the sedentary nature of writing. Like, wow, most of this is sitting down and typing! So I used to add a bit of adventure by starting at midnight and working until five. That was the excitement! But now I have two kids. So it's bankers hours for me."

I had that kind of superstitious nocturnal routine for writing as a student and O How I Loved It. And it wasn't having Pie in my life which put paid to it, it was having Mr Q. I think I'm still getting over the tremors of the cataclysmic shift he caused in my usual patterns.

Nature Notes (i)

The neighbours next door have cleared their garden at last. We overlook this garden (if you crane your neck forty-five degrees to the left) and I stand at the window for inordinate amounts of time, twitching the curtains and meditating enviously on the waste of good ground out there. All winter there has grown a sordid bloom of plastic bags, a turf war has been fought between the squirrels and the dogs for lavatorial rights, a huge trampoline has remained unbounced on, and a rolling-pin has mysteriously appeared in the midst of this all.

Now, overnight, the mess has gone. I wonder what's next after the overhaul. Borders? Decking? Perhaps the best place to start would be the balding grass: at the moment it looks like the crops have failed and the mud is winning out. I have no talent for gardening, but were I to be suddenly granted such a space I like to think I would rush out and start learning the rudiments. At the far end I'd dig a vegetable patch - I remember that being my parents' first action when we moved house - and get busy turning over the earth and forking it through, letting it exhale. Then I'd hie me hence to Wampstead library and get out some gardening books. And when the summer came I'd buy a deckchair, lug the pile of reading matter outside (they would have been renewed regularly on my library card in the meantime) and get to work, procrastinating.

Hullo trees! Hullo sky!

I've discovered a notable blog about nature in London, Tales of the City, and it makes me think... I come from the countryside, a fact of which I've always been very proud. When I read books as a child the ones I liked best were set in endless explorable wildernesses, Gardens of Eden waiting to be named. Swallows and Amazons, for instance, where the endpages are always maps drawn by Captain Nancy of places found on foot and by boat, the naming done by Titty or Roger.

When poor Dick and Dorothea, the city kids, arrive on the scene they are found guilty of all kinds of urban faux pas such as lighting fires with newspaper (instead of dry tinder) and not owning servicable Sou'westers. I find it difficult to find, let alone appreciate nature in the city, and perhaps this is partly due to the snobbishness I absorbed early on in life, through books - the idea that cities are relentless, brutalist and lacking in escape. At heart I still believe this, but I'm trying to adapt.

Yesterday I saw a rat by the canal in Brent Park!

Are they related?

Unrelated to Kilburnia, excepting the fact that I was reading Julia Cameron on the bus to Brent Cross today, news from the outside world. In today's G2, Wes Anderson answers the following question:

Which artist working today do you most admire?
- Richard Rogers, for his body of work and his approach to it.

Gosh, I thought, and by jimminy too. Is this the same Richard Rogers that Julia Cameron harps on about? (no offence to harpists, they make a lovely intelligent sound). The man who wrote umpteen musicals, some of them famous and many of them not... the point being that he simply wrote and wrote? Yes Wes, an admirable work ethic much like yours. I approve.

But now I'm having doubts. An artist working today? That can't be Rogers of Hammerstein fame - he died in 1979. Besides, he spelled his name 'Rodgers'. He must mean Rogers the architect, of Gherkin fame. What is his work ethic? I admit it must also be strong. But no, in answer to my question, they are not related, unless Wes has misunderstood the question and the Guardian has then rolled with this misunderstanding and added a typo like a cherry on top.

For the record, Wes Anderson is in my Top 10 for working-artists-most-admired.

Bells and smells

What must it be like to see everything at Pie's level? More to the point, what must it smell like? I talk about taking him out 'to get some fresh air', but you couldn't get closer to the exhaust-fume smog of the High Road unless you, too, got into a buggy. By the by, I've started calling the buggy 'the red jalopy', which invests it with some of the dignity it otherwise lacks. We bought it from a couple in Ruislip who had realised that they could no longer live in the shadow of such a beast.

On a good day, Pie is neither happy nor angry when he goes out in the red jalopy. He looks indifferent, but I think this is a mask absenting him from the world while he processes with rapt attention all of the sounds, sights and smells around him. He is like a Russian Formalist, a baby Bakhtin, a suckling Shklovsky... If you, my friend are in the throes of a literary theory essay for Eng Lit 1, all about 'making the stone stoney', then pause a while and think about the world as perceived by Pie. 'Defamiliarisation' is an awfully long word for what you do when you try making this imaginative leap.

Pie's christening took place on Saturday at the church in Quex Road. There was a mix-up at the beginning when the nun in charge of paperwork insisted that it was a Sunday and that the baby's name was 'Caroline Glenda'. That's what it said on the piece of paper, and she was d*mned if it was to be any different. It was clearly not the moment to cede to my brother's wishes and slip the priest a fiver for the name 'Mungo' to be added to the litany. Confusion reigned, and it must have been due to her that at this point I lost sight of my grey winter coat.

Running various errands today on the High Road (exchange of paper for money at the bank and money for paper at the P.O.), I decided to nip into Quex Road. I pushed the buggy up the ramp and through the swing doors of the church. Muted silence of acres of carpet, the delicious smell of polish and incense. One person up at the front, to the side, lighting candles. No sign of my coat, though, so we creaked back down the aisle and pushed our way outside. Round the back to the presbytery, where we gained admittance (what a phrase, so suited to a cloister!) and enquired about the coat. I sat for a few moments on the slippery oak bench, listening to low mutterings and revelling in the sour smell of these places: lino floors, disinfectant and institutional cooking, as sharp as a smack on the nose.

I have my coat back.

--"My dog has no nose"
--"How does he smell?"
--"He sort of sniffs the air with his tongue."*

*as told by Lloyd Thomas, or as he is now known, Lloyd Woolf