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.