Symbolic Forest

We should be banned from second-hand bookshops. They’re far too tempting. Even though we have hundreds of books, many many books we’ve never read, we still can’t resist popping into a second-hand bookshop and buying more. It’s not like going in a normal bookshop, where you have a good chance the same books will be on the shelf the following week. If you’re in a town you don’t know, and you visit a second-hand bookshop, there’s a good chance you might come across a book that you’ll never, ever see again anywhere else.

All this is making us sound very middle-aged. A weekend out for us: tea rooms and second-hand bookshops. It makes us sound like fifty-somethings. Oh well.

We’re still trying to find the Ideal Seaside Town, you see. So we went out on Saturday, to a potential one, and found a quiet (but windy) prom, a quiet (but very windy pier), a nice second-hand bookshop and a shortage of tea rooms. We did find more books for our library, though, squeezing into the bookshop. “Sorry about all the boxes everywhere”, said the proprietor. “You can’t get to all of our shelves at the moment”. Which is no doubt a good thing, because otherwise we’d only have bought more than we did.

On the pier, we got chatting to some fishermen who were leaning back and waiting for a bite. “You look a bit like Cliff Richard,” one of them said. Unfortunately I didn’t have a seagull on my head at the time, so there goes that joke. I can’t see the resemblance myself.

Keyword noise: books, bookshops, literature, lookalike, pier, seaside, shopping, Clevedon.

Well, I had planned to go shopping. I didn’t want to go to any record shops, because that always leads to me spending much more money that I’d intended. So, I was going to go to one of my favourite London shopping streets, Lower Marsh.

Lower Marsh is quite an obscure place, near the Old Vic theatre, and running down the side of Waterloo Station. For an obscure street, though, it has a bizarre and fascinating variety of shops. There’s rather geeky bookstore Ian Allan, top fetish clothing store Honour [link not really SFW], and blogging bookshop Crockatt & Powell.^*

The plan I had, you see, was to stroll into Crockett & Powell, spend too much money on interesting-looking books, and try to casually slip blogging into the conversation. “This is a fascinating shop – I only found out about it because I read your blog,” or something along those lines. Unfortunately, as I’d spent rather too long scurrying around Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture in the Tate Modern, I was running a bit late and didn’t have time to get there. Meeting people for dinner, by the time I reached Waterloo I barely had time to catch the tube and get where I was meant to be going. No time to buy any books,^** or do any blog-stalking. Disappointing.

* Update, August 25^th 2020: Sadly, Crockatt & Powell closed in 2009.

** or fetish gear, for that matter.

Keyword noise: books, bookshops, Ian Allan, London, Lower Marsh, shopping, Waterloo.