The Age of Uncertainty

Love in a Cold Climate

2012-01-18T21:35:00.007Z

Only three months ago, I was reading about the gulags in 'Life and Fate', thinking how awful it would be to do hard labour in sub-zero temperatures. Now, by some cruel twist of fate, I'm doing exactly that. If Solzhenitsyn was still alive, I'd feel that I could look him in the eye.

Admitedly I'm not a political prisoner, there are no armed guards waiting to shoot me if I try to leave and I'm not mining uranium with my bare hands, so the analogy doesn't quite hold up. But it has been very cold.

However, it will have all been worthwhile if I can find some decent books. For the time being, here are some indecent ones that I found today:

"Underneath their uniforms, they were simply girls - warm, soft, yielding creatures who lived fast and loved too recklessly..."

From the 'Five Miles High' club to the '500 Miles High' version:

"She's young, she's lovely - she's an astronaut! And she's been assigned a dangerous mission: to discover the whereabouts of four missing male astronauts who had preceded her to the moon."

If this was the 1970s, I could make a link using the words 'moon' and 'heavenly bodies':

"Laura was the kind of woman that every man wanted to undress - but she never gave them the chance - she did it herself!"

This nonsense all stopped in the early 80s. Was it just AIDS that made promiscuity less appealing or were there other factors too, like the demise of modernism, the growing realisation that sexual liberation had been rather one-sided and the increasing demand for equal opportunities? Also, what part did technology play - first the video recorder, then the internet - in putting an end to 'sauce' and 'titilation'?

Oddly enough, I don't find the images themselves that dated. Look at the video of Pixie Lott's 'What Do You Take Me For?' and it's as if the 1980s never happened. What really dates these books are the hilarious blurbs, with their "warm, soft, yielding creatures..."

It all seems a world away from this:

Doris Lessing reacts to Nobel win

2012-01-14T12:05:00.000Z

This amused me:

Austerity and Atonement

2012-01-12T19:25:00.002Z

Several people have kindly emailed me recently, asking how they can find Steerforth Books. The answer is, I'm afraid,with great difficulty. At the moment I operate almost by stealth, selling books in the dark corners of the internet, like a 1940s black marketeer (but all above board, I hasten to add).

As for the actual home of Steerforth Books, it's a small dot in the middle of this photograph:

I'm tempted to do a sort of 'spot-the-ball' competition, but I'm not quite sure where I am. Wherever it is, it's too far from my house, but at least the journey takes me through some beautiful countryside.

Yesterday, on the way home, I turned off down a small lane and ended up here:

The atmospheric mist is actually a bonfire - just out of the picture a man, who looked as if he'd escaped from the 14th century, was burning leaves. I smiled at him. He snarled back.

Driving through Sussex, you can travel through time as well as space. The main roads inhabit a world of wi-fi, retail parks and smoothies, but take a B road and you suddenly find yourself among the ghosts of other Englands: medieval, Georgian, Victorian and early 20th century, where woodsmoke rises from the chimneys of solitary cottages and death watch beetles rattle in ancient beams (I originally wrote 'death watch beatles', which would be a good name for a geriatric tribute act).

Sometimes I dream of being in one of those lonely buildings, with a fruit and vegetable garden, some chickens and a shed for my books. However, I would miss being in a town, particularly Lewes. I love the feeling of being connected, looking out at the roofs of my neighbours' houses at twilight and listening to the footsteps of people coming home from work.

But to return to Steerforth Books, I feel quietly optimistic about the business. The sales are growing steadily every week and, by Easter, I think I'll have reached a level where the profits provide a reasonable income.

In the meantime, Mrs Steerforth and I have adopted austerity measures. Trips to Waitrose are out and I have made a solemn promise not to do any internet shopping under the influence of alcohol (although I don't regret buying the meteorite).

On the subject of alcohol, we have both decided to cut out drinking during the week. Sharing a bottle of wine in the evening had become a habit. It felt like a reward for the challenges we had faced during the day. But, aside from the health risks, when I worked out how much we were spending I realised that it would pay for a holiday.

Mrs Steerforth was particularly keen to cut down on wine after disgracing herself at a party on New Year's Eve, when she became more drunk than I have ever seen her.

Ironically, only hours earlier, she had published an article about the secrets of avoiding a hangover on New Year's Day.

Quite how Mrs Steerforth failed to follow her own advice is a mystery, but she was one of many people who have fallen victim to our neighbours' generosity with alcohol. She has no memory of jumping up and down to 'Born Slippy' or trying to read a bedtime story to our sons at 12.30am before sliding down the stairs.

But the true moment of horror came the following morning, when my wife couldn't find the underwear she'd been wearing the night before. The expression on her face when I suggested it might be next door was priceless (as was the look of relief when I later told her that it was actually in our bathroom).

Since then, Mrs Steerforth has been drinking elderflower juice by the gallon, determined to atone for her transgression.

2012 is going to be a year of sobriety and hard work. The next few months are going to be particularly exhausting for me, but it will hopefully all be worthwhile in the end. On the plus side, I should soon have a new range of book covers and ephemera to share - this blog hasn't been the same without them.

A Message to the Future

2012-01-09T17:50:00.003Z

I've resisted trying to do anything clever with the layout of this blog during the last five years, but this evening I thought I'd have a look at some of the new features in Blogger.

That was a big mistake.

In a matter of seconds, I managed to ruin the layout and lose both my links and Bravenet counter stats. I am now working on restoring the blog to its former 2006-style glory, but in the meantime, here is a message to the future from Bertrand Russell:

Last Year in the Book Trade

2012-01-02T23:12:00.008Z

As far as the book trade is concerned, I think most people would agree that it was the year of the Kindle, with over a million sold per week in December. HarperCollins alone sold 100,000 ebooks on Christmas Day.

This time last year I was firmly in the anti-Kindle camp and wrote several posts extolling the virtues of the printed page over the soulless, grey world of ebooks. But I protested too much and one blogger very astutely commented that I was actually "on the verge of Kindledom".

I finally gave in during March, swayed by the comments made by fellow bloggers and I have to say, I love my Kindle. It's convenient (my nearest proper bookshop is eight miles away), doesn't clutter up my shelves with books I'll never read again and gives me the chance the try sample chapters before I commit to buying the books.

But there's a dark side to all of this. The Kindle also threatens many booksellers with extinction and could make it harder for authors to earn a living wage from their writing, so I'm in the process of rethinking how I buy books. Particularly after this Facebook discussion that took place a couple of days ago (I won't name the author, as she hasn't given me permission to quote):

Reader 1 -Also love my Kindle and am a sucker for an amazon bargain (sorry). Can't beat the personal service of the 7s bookshop though... Is the publishing world doing anything to support authors? Surely no incentive to write (and I'm aware noone is in it for the money) means no wares to sell?

Author - @Reader 1 - 'Is the publishing world doing anything to support authors?' There is a short answer to this. No. Having been an author for ten years and knowing that my books have been appreciated by thousands I am now forced to consider writing a hobby as I could earn more working on a supermarket check out or sweeping the streets. x

Reader 2 - I'm buying ebooks for an average of £5 each. How much of this is going to the author?

Author - @Reader 2 - this is a good question. For the two of my books that have earned out the advance - if you buy it for £5 I believe I may get as much as about 0.20p (but I have to check this) For the two that have not earned out the advance I get nothing. For the 0.99p purchace of Steve's above the author may - if they are lucky and have earned out - get about 0.5p. But I may be exaggerating the payment to the author wildly here. I always encourage my readers to buy their books from bookshops to keep the bookshops open.

Reader 2 - I'm really shocked. I was always under the impression that authors received 10% of the rrp, with the burden of any discounts shouldered by the publisher and retailer. What's the best thing we can do to support writers?

Author - @Reader 2 - no the author gets 10% of whatever the book is sold at... after (and if) the advance is earned out (and it's only earned out by a payment at 10 % of whatever the book is sold at) and then after that the agent takes 15% so if people like Steve buy books at 0.99p ... The best thing you can do to support an author is to buy the book from a bookshop at the price that is on the cover. Likewise on Kindle if you pay full price for the download then the author may eventually get a small payment.

The controversy over the 'agency model' (and you can read a full explanation here if you're interested) will continue to rage in 2012. Like a lot of readers, I like cheap books, but not at the authors' expense.

The other big event of 2011 was the rescue of Waterstone's from the edge of oblivion. For people outside the UK, I should explain that it's Britain's largest specialist chain bookseller and for ten years, was run by a succession of 'retailers' (i.e. people who thought that selling books was no different from selling shoes or CDs) who almost destroyed the business. Waterstone's is now in private ownership, freed from the tyranny of short-termism, with a real bookseller at the helm for the first time in years.

However, although things are now looking more positive, I can't help feeling that it's still too late for Waterstone's and that MD James Daunt is merely a Alexander Kerensky/Shapour Bakhtiar figure, unable to stop the tide of history. I may be wrong. Perhaps James Daunt can cure Waterstone's, but I suspect that palliative care is the most he can provide.

As for the literary highlights of 2011, I'll leave that to the many other bloggers - John Self, Gaskella and company - who are highly accomplished book reviewers. However, I will mention one first novel which, I felt, didn't receive the press attention it deserved - 'Wall of Days' by Alastair Bruce -in spite of being picked by Amazon in its 'Rising Stars' promotion.

If I try to explain the plot I might put you off, so it's probably better to simply include this link to the first few pages. If you like bald, understated prose, like Cormac McCarthy or M. J. Hyland, where devastating truths are hidden beneath mundane recollections, then I can highly recommend this magical novel.

Another reason why Wall of Days struck a chord is that for several years, I'd had a novel brewing in my head that had a very similar beginning. As soon as I began reading the first page, I felt a huge sense of relief that someone had written the novel for me and done a much better job of it. I can now hit the pillow without any more recurring images of grey skies and tussock grass.

Finally, I must mention one other book: Vasily Grossman's 'Life and Fate', which is belatedly being acknowledged as one of the great novels of the 20th century, comparable to War and Peace in its scope and ambition. Although the English translation appeared a few years ago, it wasn't until 2011 that Grossman's epic began to receive the recognition it deserved.

It took me over a month to read Life and Fate, but I would happily read it all over again tomorrow.

Finally, I'd like to wish anyone who reads 'the Age of Uncertainty' a Happy New Year. After a number of challenges and upheavals last year, the blog began to run out of steam towards the end of the year, as I was exhausted by family difficulties and preoccupied with setting up my own bookselling business.

Perhaps, after five years, this blog has reached a natural end. But it's possible that once I have new sources of stock, there will be other stories to tell. I really enjoy sharing the strange fragments of lost lives that seem to come my way and hope that there will be more to come.

We shall see.

A Different Tune

2011-12-30T12:28:00.006Z

I've just returned from Rye, where I met an old friend for a drink.

Twelve years ago he was living around the corner from my flat in Twickenham, earning a fortune in business publishing, but hating every minute of his working day. Then one day he decided he'd had enough, sold his flat for £120,000 and bought another on the Kent coast for £60,000, using the balance to pay off his mortgage.

He's never had a 'proper' job since, and seems much happier for it.

Last year he was invited to audition for a French punk-folk band (he is a violinist) and phoned to book a seat as a foot passenger on a cross-channel ferry. "I'm sorry," he was told, "but we don't accept foot passengers any more, only people with vehicles. You'll have to pay the car rate, which is £60".

My friend slammed the phone down in disgust, lit a cigarette and fumed. Then he had an idea and redialled the number:

"You said I had to pay for a vehicle. If I came by bicycle, how much would that cost?"

"£10".

Two weeks later, my friend was the sole cyclist in a slowly moving queue of cars and lorries at Dover's docks, congratulating himself for his moral victory over mindless bureaucracy. The band were apparently waiting for him in Calais, so he decided to spend the hour-long crossing relaxing in the bar.

With five minutes left until the ferry docked, my friend made his way down to the vehicle hold and unchained his bicycle. Soon, he could hear the sound of chains moving and ramps descending, followed by the hissing of hydraulic brakes as the lorries began to edge forward. He quickly phoned one of the band members to find out where he needed to go.

"'Allo Graham. You muss follow le traffique and take ze second exit on the left. Yes? We are 500 metres away".

Graham followed their directions faithfully, making sure that he took the correct exit and found himself cycling up a rather steep ramp, which left him feeling a little breathless. To his relief, the ramp became flatter and seemed to be joining a proper road, then suddenly: WOOSSSHHHHH!

A powerful gust of wind almost knocked him off his bike and to Graham's horror, he found himself on a motorway being buffeted by a succession of fast-moving lorries. There didn't seem any way to get off the motorway. Terrified, he stood on the edge of the slow lane, wondering what to do next.

Suddenly, Graham's phone rang: "'Allo Graham. Eet is me again. Do NOT take ze second exit! Comprenez-vous? It is the WRONG exit!"

After a farcical (and very dangerous) half hour spent trying to leave the motorway, Graham eventually found the band and began what turned out to be a very alcoholic weekend. He now plays gigs with them on both sides of the channel.

It's strange how people's lives can change so much, in ways that we could never predict.

In the late 1990s, Graham seemed to have it all. He was earning at least four times as much as me and always seemed to be getting promoted. Evenings were often spent in smart restaurants, dining with the leading lights of international banking, or at the Strangers' Bar at the House of Commons, getting gossip from drunken MPs.

Occasionally Graham would say how depressed he was by the ease of his ascent. He'd never been particularly interested in business publishing and couldn't understand why people at the highest levels accepted him as one of their own. Success bought financial rewards and status, but also increasing levels of stress, boredom and frustration.

I don't know what finally pushed Graham to suddenly hand his notice in and he'd never expressed any interest in visiting Kent, let alone living there, but within the space of a few months he completely transformed his life.

Today, Graham plays the fiddle at folk festivals and private functions, earning just enough to pay the bills and enjoy the occasional trip to India. He lives quite frugally but is completely debt-free and doesn't miss his old life at all.

I'm sure that Graham's example partly gave me the courage and inspiration to change my life. Unlike Graham, I've never had to face the same temptations (although I was made a very attractive offer earlier this year), but it was still hard to take a leap into the unknown.

After saying goodbye to Graham, I sat on the train and looked at BBC News. In a piece about people who died in 2011, I saw these particularly apposite quotes by Steve Jobs:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

I know it's easy to make statements like that when you're the billionaire CEO of a corporation (I'm not sure what the Chinese sweatshop workers who make many of Apple's products would say), but I agree with the sentiments.

I think that next year will be all about putting these ideas into practice.

The Age of Uncertainty

2011-12-21T08:50:00.002Z

This evening, as we were driving home in the dark after returning a van to a slightly menacing industrial estate, my wife turned to me and said, 'You haven't done your blog for ages.'

This came as a shock. Obviously I knew that I hadn't written any posts for over a month - the longest gap in five years of blogging - but I had no idea that my wife was aware of this. She used to claim that she never read my blog, as she was far too busy being an übermother to fritter her time away on such trifles.

I hadn't intended to stop blogging, but it seemed a rather self-indulgent thing to do while I was trying to establish an internet business. Also, I couldn't think of anything to say. However, after receiving several kind emails from people who have wondered if things are okay, I thought I'd write this brief post.

I've now been self-employed for 11 weeks and, although it hasn't been a particularly easy time, I feel liberated in so many ways. Steerforth Books didn't get off to a rip-roaring start, but thanks to the kindness and generosity of a fellow blogger (I won't embarrass them here, but I am eternally grateful), it received a huge boost and the business no longer feels like a pipe dream.

I've no idea what the future holds. I've swapped the dependable, but soul-destroying, certainty of my last job for something that makes emotional sense, but may lead to financial ruin. Have I made a terrible mistake?

All I know is that the worst decisions I've ever made have all been rational ones that appeared to make perfect sense, whilst the best ones have been inspired by childhood fantasies, daydreaming, gut instincts and my adolescent sense of right and wrong. In the last two months, I feel that I have become me again, after years in exile.

Perhaps this is my mid-life crisis. All of the elements are there: an aging parent, a child entering adolescence and the sense of having possibly passed the halfway point. Some men respond by dying their hair that weird, chestnut colour and sleeping with someone in their 20s. My ambitions are hopefully less ridiculous.

I apologise for the solemn nature of this post. I have just been to Sainsbury's in Newhaven and it always has that effect on me. I've no idea why.

Travels With My Aunt

2011-11-18T19:52:00.007Z

Last week, during a particularly depressing, overcast, autumnal day, I decided to clear out the loft. I say loft, but after converting most of it into a third bedroom, all we have left are some hidden eaves which look like the sorts of places where people used to hide from the Gestapo.

Getting into the eaves requires a Houdini-like dexterity, as the space is so narrow. Getting out is even harder, reminding me of the claustrophobic tunnel scenes in The Great Escape. On several occasions, when my wife has failed to hear my hysterical shouting, I've had to phone her and ask to be rescued.

Fortunately, this time I seemed to be more pliable (perhaps six weeks away from the 9 to 5 routine has relaxed my tensed muscles?) and managed to move around easily, unpacking boxes that had remained unopened since we moved here ten years ago.

Almost everything I found was of no use or value to anyone, but there was one exception: a small square box with a Super 8 cine film inside.

This is what it contained:

The woman pushing twigs into the kettle was my mother's sister, Patricia Eunice Dorothy Prior, who worked as a midwife in a small town at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, in Morocco. Officially she was a missionary, sponsored by a number of churches in Britain, but as it was against the law to promote any religion other than Islam, my aunt had to limit her activities to good works.

Pat grew up in a family of six who lived in the upstairs half of a small, terraced house. She shared a bed with her two sisters and at night she would lie awake listening to the sound of mice scuttling across the floor.

My aunt, on the left

Her parents' ambitions for her were typical for their background: at 14 she could either go into service or get a job in a shop. But Pat was bright. She passed her 11 Plus and got into Richmond Grammar School, where she sat her final exams during an air raid.

If Pat had come from another background she might have gone to university, but higher education was never an option. Fortunately, her parents didn’t object when Pat announced that she wished to train as a nurse.

My aunt during her training, on the left (above) and second row, third from left (below)

By all accounts Pat was an exceptional student and the skills she learned at West Middlesex Hospital would prove invaluable a few years later, when she decided to train to become a missionary. In Pat’s words, she had a ‘calling’ and felt compelled to pursue it. A gruelling training at Bible College followed, during which Pat had to learn to become fluent at reading and writing Arabic.

I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for Pat when she first arrived in Morocco, where a young, single woman was a second-class citizen. However, during the next 25 years, my aunt carved out a successful life for herself, respected by everyone in the community.

It helped that almost every person under the age of 20 had been delivered by my aunt, sometimes under difficult conditions. Many local families felt that they owed Pat a debt.

When I was 16, Pat invited me to stay with her. We couldn’t afford to travel as a family, so I flew alone to Casablanca and met my aunt at the airport. It was a 300km journey to her home and, as we drove south, my preconceived notions of an arid, desert-like country were replaced by vivid memories of lush pine forests, snow-capped mountains and orange-blossom scented air.

It was a culture shock. I had grown up in a dull London suburb, where evening meals alternated between fish fingers and beef burgers. Suddenly, I was plunged into an alien world of strange food, exotic landscapes and opulent souks.

I had been terrified of eating the local food (particularly when I learned that I would have to eat everything that was put in front of me), but I needn’t have worried. After two weeks of dates, artichokes, couscous, mint tea and carrot and orange salad, I learned that eating could be a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Morocco changed my life. It awakened me to a new, sensual world of smell, taste and colour. But, more importantly, for the first time in my life I learned to see my own society more objectively, realising that happiness was not related to GDP.

I was in a privileged position in many ways. As my aunt enjoyed some prestige in the local area, we were invited into several homes and I was struck by the contrast between the public and private worlds of the local people. Outside, I only saw impoverished-looking mud-brick walls and austere, veiled women. Inside, the veils came down and I found myself in colourful, comfortable rooms, full of laughter and conversation.

Using my aunt as an interpreter, I was able to have conversations with people and, perhaps because of my age, I could get away with asking direct questions.

I had arrived at the right time too. Television aerials were starting to appear on buildings, but the town was still largely cut off from the outside world. As a European, I could have encountered some hostility, but the days of French colonialism belonged to a past generation and religious enmities belonged to a future one. I was treated as an honoured guest.

When I returned home, I felt very depressed for a while. I looked out of my bedroom window at the different shades of grey, from the slate roofs of houses to the low-lying clouds, and yearned for blue skies, prickly pears and orange blossom. I could see why my aunt didn’t want to come home.

Nine years later, my aunt was reluctantly contemplating retirement in Britain. She would have to swap social status and a large house for the genteel poverty of a state pension and a pokey flat. I think she dreaded it.

Pat came home for a short visit to sort out her affairs and work out where she was going to live. On the last day, I said goodbye to my aunt and wanted to hug her, but Pat wasn’t a physically demonstrative person and I was afraid that I might unnerve her, as if we were saying goodbye for the last time.

The next day Pat arrived at Tangiers Airport and was planning to get a lift home from a friend, but a Moroccan lawyer was waiting for her and insisted that she travelled with him instead. He was interested in buying her house and wanted to get her signature on some of the legal documents. They argued for a few minutes until Pat finally agreed.

During the journey from the airport, a lorry crashed into the side of the lawyer’s car. My aunt died a few hours later. The lawyer escaped with a few scratches.

Most of my aunt’s friends were Christians and their attempts to find some meaning in her death only increased my sense of the utter futility of it. I couldn’t accept the argument that some crude form of divine intervention had spared my aunt the horrors of retired life in England. I know that she would have made a successful new life for herself and been a doting great-aunt to my sons.

My aunt’s death was tragic and pointless, however her life certainly wasn’t, because I know that in a small town 2000 miles away, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of lives that wouldn’t have been lived without her.

Chair Way To Devon

2011-11-13T19:54:00.010Z

According to my wife I am impulsive, frequently making rash, reckless decisions that I later regret. I'm not sure how true this is. My most impulsive act - spontaneously booking a flight to Chile because the weather in February was depressing me - made perfect sense.

I would also argue that it was due to my impulsiveness that we got on the property ladder, during a brief lull in the housing market.

However, the case for the prosecution has become much stronger recently, thanks to a moment of madness on eBay a couple of weeks ago, when I made a winning bid (in fact the only bid) for four Edwardian chairs.

It seemed too good to be true: £40 for the lot. Surely I could sell them for at least £200?

It was only after I'd congratulated myself for winning the chairs that I realised that collecting them would involve a 350-mile round trip to Devon.

I don't mind driving long distances in the Nevada desert, but in Britain it's an endurance course of roundabouts, roadworks, caravans and geriatric drivers. I was very tempted to pull out and tell the seller that they could keep the money.

However, this morning I began the long drive along the coast of southern England. To make the journey bearable, I had several CDs of Radio Four podcasts: a recent Start the Week, from Sydney, with Thomas Keneally, Kate Grenville and Deborah Cheetham; the first episode of a dramatisation of 'Life and Fate'; a documentary about Elgar during the First World War and two episodes of 'Desert Island Discs', with Diana Athill and Ann Leslie.

When 'Life and Fate' was first broadcast as a BBC radio drama, two months ago, I considered listening to it as an alternative to tackling the dauntingly thick book. But in another edition of Start the Week, Linda Grant was so persuasive about Life and Fate's status as one of the great 20th century novels, I felt I had to read the book.

I'm really glad I did.The radio adaptation is perfectly fine, but it's very different from the book and barely scratches the surface of Grossman's complex, profound masterpiece.

Sadly, just as the episode really started to take off, I hit a succession of roundabouts and every other minute the Satnav lady bellowed instructions at me, which was rather distracting:

"Ludymila, we are returning to Moscow! We must TAKE THE SECOND EXIT AT THE NEXT ROUNDABOUT."

I arrived at the house just before 11.00. Luckily, I remembered the Remembrance Sunday two minutes' silence in time to avoid any faux pas.

In the window of the front door, there was a slightly intimidating notice warning that the owners possessed a ferocious, possibly illegal dog. I wondered what I was letting myself in for. Fortunately, the seller was a really nice man who seemed genuinely concerned that I had made such a ridiculously long journey (I'm not sure if it was my physical or mental health that he was worried about).

On the way back I decided to make a detour to one of my favourite places - Lyme Regis:

The Cobb hasn't changed very much since Jane Austen described it in 'Persuasion'. Today it wasn't quite as dramatic as the opening scene in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (when Meryl Streep's stunt double was nearly washed into the sea) and people confidently ambled along the occasionally treacherous stones:

I've lost count of how many times I've been to Lyme. I used to dream of running the bookshop there and imagined walking along the seafront during winter storms, searching for fossils that had been loosened from the crumbling, slate cliffs.

During the journey home, I discovered that 300,000 Londoners used the Underground to shelter from air raids in the First World War, compared to 150,000 during the Blitz. I also learned about the enforced separation of Australian Aboriginal babies from their mothers, Diana Athill's first kiss and Ann Leslie's bizarre meeting with Indira Gandhi.

It might have been a long drive, but there are worse ways of spending a day than driving through pleasant countryside, listening to intelligent conversation.

I now have four chairs to sell (which I may end up keeping) and I'm relieved to say that my rather pathetic inventory of 42 books has now increased to 437. Only 7563 books to go.

One other piece of good news: I now also have a 'Steerforth Books' header, which has subtle echoes of the Downs and 1940s book jackets. I shall be using this on my website when it's launched next year:

I can't wait to get started.

Arcane Fire

2011-11-06T14:41:00.007Z

I'm feeling a little fragile today, as I celebrated November 5th at my next door neighbours' house and whenever I go there, things always get out of hand. I don't know how much I had to drink, but at some point in the evening I became an expert on subjects as diverse as French history and Arcade Fire.

Luckily I think I got away with it.

Our party included a French woman and a Canadian girl who had never seen the famous Lewes bonfire procession before, so we tried to prepare them for some of the more bizarre aspects of the evening.

Last year my neighbour forgot to warn a visitor - a black South African - that the parade included some local people 'blacked-up' and dressed as Zulus. She said that it was a slightly uncomfortable moment, but luckily he was more bemused than horrified.

It's estimated that every November 5th, the town's population swells from 16,000 to 60,000, much to the annoyance of many locals. However, there is a quieter part of Lewes where the crowds are bearable.

Here's a short video that I took last night:

The next video, which I didn't take, gives a much better idea of the scale of the crowds and the wonderful sense of anarchy that pervades the town:

I think there was an attempt, a few years ago, to address the obvious health and safety issues, but officials gave up in despair. However, beyond the facade of chaos and pyromania, there are plenty of people on hand - from St John's Ambulance volunteers to plain-clothes police officers - to ensure that the public are safe.

According to the BBC, last night there were 15 arrests and 170 injuries, only two of which were serious (and not caused by fireworks).

Apparently it used to be a lot worse before the 1850s. I wonder why things changed?

Lovejoy

2011-11-04T21:34:00.007Z

I am now selling antiques.

I'm not quite sure how this happened, but an earlier joke about becoming the Lovejoy of bookselling has turned out to be remarkably prescient.

(I read somewhere that Lovejoy has been shown in 127 countries, however if you are from Iran and haven't seen the pirated Farsi-dubbed DVDs, I should explain that he is a fashion icon and widely-respected specialist in antiquties, whose chaste courtship with a woman called Lady Jane would surely appeal to even the most conservative clerics.)

I fully intended to stick to books - that's what I know about - but when I saw a set of Edwardian chairs on sale for £40 on eBay, I couldn't resist and made a winning bid, with only seconds to go.

I wish the chairs weren't in Devon - 320 miles seems a long way to travel in one day, but I'm convinced that I can make a decent mark-up if I ensure that the chairs are well-photographed and the auction ends on a weekend evening (when many potential buyers will have had a few drinks).

Even if I don't make any money, the chairs will have served their purpose by making me realise that there's no earthly reason why I have to stick to books. I can sell anything I like, as long as I make a profit.

Indeed, earlier in the week, I contemplated emailing the person who's designing my logo and getting them to scrap the word 'books'.

But just as I was losing any faith in getting some stock, the phone rang. It was a man who'd just seen an advert I'd placed in a local paper: would I be interested in buying some military history books?

I scribbled down the address and agreed to drive over the following morning.

The next day, as I rang the bell of a stranger's house in a town I'd never been to before, I wondered what to expect. An older man opened the door and asked me to remove my shoes and go upstairs. I quickly checked the number to make sure that I had the right house (after an embarrassing incident where I unwittingly turned up to someone else's massage appointment).

It was the right place.

I was led into a bedroom which, to my relief, had several boxes of books. My heart sank when I saw a pile of short story anthologies (they're impossible to sell), but some of the other titles were more promising.

I'd been worrying about how to agree on a price - I hate haggling - and made what I thought was a fair offer. He accepted it immediately, which made me wonder if I could have got away with less. But although I need to make a living, I don't want to rip people off. There has to be an honourable compromise.

I now have 38 books, plus a kind donation from the Poet Laura-eate, bringing the total inventory to 42 titles. That's about 0.5% of the total I need to achieve what my old boss James Heneage always used to refer to as 'critical mass'.

It's going to be a long, hard slog.

Deep End

2011-11-01T22:01:00.011Z

I've just watched an extraordinary 1970 British film called 'Deep End'. It received widespread critical acclaim when it was released and was a huge success at the Venice Film Festival. But in spite of this, it became almost completely forgotten in the years that followed and until recently, nobody was sure if any prints had survived.

Fortunately, a copy was found recently and the BFI have just released a cleaned-up version on Blu-ray and DVD.

Here's a trailer:

I say 'British' film, but in fact it was financed by the USA and West Germany, written and directed by a Pole - Jerzy Skolimowski - and mostly shot in Munich, with a superb soundtrack by the 'Krautrock' band Can. However, it feels authentically home grown, capturing the depressed, 'morning after' feel of the early 70s perfectly.

The film stars Jane Asher and the 16-year-old John Moulder-Brown. I'd never heard of Moulder-Brown and for people of my age, Jane Asher was that nice middle-aged lady who made cakes and used to go out with Paul McCartney. I had no idea what a fantastic actress she was, or how devastatingly sexy she could be.

Indeed, the whole film is one of the sexiest things I've ever seen on screen, as Jane Asher's Susan teases and plays with the pubescent passions of 15-year-old Mike. If I'd met Susan when I was 15, I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Here is the opening scene. As you'll see, there's some dodgy lip-synch going on with the baths' manager. That's because many of the actors were Germans, who must have been dubbed later:

'Deep End' also contains an extraordinary cameo from 1950s screen goddess, Diana Dors, who manages to create a wonderfully grotesque scene that is both comic and deeply unsettling, with an unusual reversal of gender roles.

Dors appears here at the beginning and end of this clip, but if you don't want to see all six minutes, skip to 4:04:

Finally, before I end up posting the whole film, I particularly liked this scene. The interplay between Jane Asher's Susan and Erica Beer's cashier works very well, but the red paint almost steals the show:

I was planning to write a long post about 'Deep End'. However, I found this excellent Guardian article by Ryan Gilbey which says what I was going to say, but far more eloquently. This review by Christopher Weedman is also worth reading.

It's strange how British this film feels, given that it was conceived and filmed by a Polish director who had never filmed in Britain before. Like Emeric Pressburger before him, Jerzy Skolimowski managed to take a universal theme and make it seem both quintessentially British and utterly alien at the same time.

The result is a triumph.

October is the Cruelest Month

2011-10-29T15:34:00.001Z

It's ironic that now I have all the time in the world to write, my blogging has almost ground to a halt. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd imagined writing posts about the progress of 'Steerforth Books' and my first steps in the precarious world of self-employment.

Sadly, the last four weeks have been a bit of a disaster. Within 24 hours of leaving my job, everyone in the Steerforth household succumbed to the horrible Norovirus, which had the one redeeming feature of rapid weight loss.

At times I felt as if I'd made a terrible mistake. Lying in bed, surrounded by people making zombie-like groaning noises, I couldn't help looking back fondly to the ordered world of my last job. Perhaps I had just made one of the most stupid decisions of my life.

In the end I wrote a list of the positives and negatives of my last job. There were two positives: the books and some of the people. The negatives were everything else. Suddenly everything seemed much clearer.

It's just as well that I felt reasonably sure about my move, as the month didn't get any better. Bits of the house collapsed, someone died and both of my sons succumbed to further illnesses.

As for Steerforth Books, it was just a name. I had no stock to sell, thanks to my former managing director's last minute intervention.

It would be easy to become despondent, but I'm fairly sanguine. There are times when it pays to be a pessimist and before I handed my notice in, I made sure that my business plan could survive a number of setbacks (including a mean-spirited former employer). I knew that it could take months to get Steerforth Books off the ground and planned accordingly, so it's not over yet.

I will be glad to see the back of October, but it hasn't been completely dreadful. I've been enjoying Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece 'Life and Fate', watching some long-forgotten British films of the 1960s and trying to become a domestic god, with mixed results. I also had a very pleasant evening out at the Lewes Arms with two fellow bloggers.

In some ways it's not a bad life, but even if I could afford to never work again, I don't think I'd change my plans. I really miss working with books.

I particularly love being surrounded by old books and sometimes feel as if I am in the literary equivalent of a telephone exchange, connected by invisible skeins to the lives of strangers. However great or absurd the titles are, they have furnished both rooms and minds. My passion, I suppose, is to try and find them new owners.

So the plan for the rest of the year is simple: fix the ceiling and get some books. Now that I've come clean about my lack of progress, perhaps I'll also write some more blog posts - there are recent discoveries that I want to share.

Early This Morning

2011-10-16T20:23:00.003Z

I've always been very dismissive of camera phones and could never understand why they became so popular. The picture quality was consistently awful and transfering the images to a computer was tedious, but in spite of this many people still chose to record some of the most important moments of their life with photos that made the Kodak Instamatic look like the Hubble Telescope. Why?

However, I have now discovered a phone that has a half-decent camera:

This morning I was driving back from a particularly awful car boot sale that would have made a street market in Burkina Faso look luxuriantly decadent. I don't what I hated most: the piles of used shoes that looked like something out of 'Schindler's List', or the dew-soaked DVDs of low budget horror films like 'Satan's Little Helper'.

After such a depressing experience, I decided to lift the spirits with a visit to the Long Man of Wilmington. It was a beautiful morning and as I got out of the car, I regreted not bring a camera with me.

Then I remembered my new phone:

It's not a great photo. The saturation's not right and the zoom has affected the sharpness, but compared to the old VGA images that I was used to, this was a revelation. It's almost good.

This image was taken without the zoom function:

Not great, but not bad either.

This lacks sharpness, but the colours are far richer than the washed-out, grainy sub-CCTV images on my old phone.

A decent camera would have been able to cope more effectively with the contrasts of light and dark, but it's still perfectly acceptable.

As I fiddled with the phone's touch screen, The Long Man looked on impassively. He'd seen it all: Roman centurions, Saxon thanes, medieval pilgrims, Victorian farmers and, today, people in garish fleeces walking their oversexed dogs along public footpaths.

I shall be seeing a lot more of the Long Man in the future. I think we're going to get along very well.

Farm Fresh

2011-10-02T13:21:00.003Z

It was nearly 30 degrees yesterday, so we sought refuge in the shade of Wilderness Wood. Like the ferns in this picture, I don't thrive in direct sunlight.

On the way back, I stopped in a farm shop (as the food in Waitrose just isn't expensive enough) and was surprised to find it completely deserted. I walked around the wooden floor with heavy, giant steps, but nobody came. Then I tried slamming down the freezer lids more vigorously than usual, but still nothing.

Minutes later, a ruddy-faced man came stumbling out of a door at the back of the shop and greeted me:

"Haven't been waiting long, have you sir? Found what you want? Or perhaps what your wife wants. Mind you, the wives don't know what we get up to when we're on our own, do they?"

He gave a half wink that reminded me of a rather unpleasant uncle I once had.

I smiled and nodded knowingly , thinking "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about". Did he mean that, that or that?

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Caption Competition

2011-09-26T13:40:00.004Z

My favourite finds from this afternoon:

Most of my captions are too rude to repeat.

Any suggestions?

The Horror

2011-09-25T21:13:00.003Z

This afternoon, my oldest son and I caught a taxi to Ditchling Beacon and walked home along the South Downs Way. My son didn't want to go, but he is still young enough to be manipulated by false promises and cheap incentives. Once he was up on the Downs, the grunting and shoulder shrugging were replaced with animated conversations about serial killers and horror films.

It was a beautiful day, but halfway between the summer and winter solstices, the light had a muted quality, as if the sun itself was failing.

Frustratingly, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, my mind played through a tracklist of annoying music: the theme tune of Lazy Town, a Sousa march, something by the Black-Eyed Peas, If You're Happy and You Know Clap Your Hands (my one gesture of defiance at primary school was to hold my hands wide apart during this song).

Then I started wondering if I hadn't made a terrible mistake when I handed my notice in. Every other news story last week seemed to be about the imminent collapse of the Western economy. Was this a good time to be leaving paid employment and setting up a business? Was I even setting up a business, or was I just quitting my job and pretending that I wasn't unemployed?

A man on a hang-glider hovered 50 feet above us, gently rising with the thermals. It was so quiet and the air so still that he must have heard my son's voice:

"Dad, ask me about any serial killer and I bet I'll have heard of them. Do you know about Leatherface? Do know what he did?"

Three weeks ago he knew nothing about Leatherface, but now that my son has started at secondary school he's suddenly a man of the world, determined to earn respect from his peers with his encyclopaedic knowledge of horror films that he has never actually seen. I hope.

The walk from Ditchling Beacon is perfect: only six miles and downhill all the way, with glorious views of the Weald on one side and the coast on the other. It is mostly open countryside, following ancient paths that enabled people to avoid the dense forests of the lowlands. Sadly, wooded areas like 'Black Cap' are a rarity now:

Further on, Lewes appeared in the distance, so far away that like an astronaut on the moon, I could blot it out with one hand. I liked the fact that it was so finite. I had grown up in suburban London, where one town simply merged into another, sometimes worse than the previous mile, sometimes better.

A young girl galloped past on a colt and I felt a vicarious rush of pleasure. My son turned to me:

"Dad, can we watch The Ring? Not the original version - that's an 18, but the American one, because that's only 15. Don't ask Mum, she'll say no. Can we? Several of my friends at school have seen it."

He reeled off a list of names that sounded like characters from Blake's Seven. Why aren't children just called John and Mary any more? I blame Dynasty and Home and Away.

As we reached the outskirts of Lewes, I realised how many things had changed in the last year. We'd had an awful time, but it hadn't lasted. Seeing my mother, blissfully happy in her new home and my son, confidently ambling home with his new friends at a school I never thought we'd get him to, I felt relief more than joy; like someone who has survived a storm at sea.

We turned the corner into our road and I told my son that he'd just walked six miles, rather than the three I'd led him to believe. "You didn't get even slightly tired. You should be proud of yourself."

He turned to me. "Dad, when we get home, will you watch Creep with me?"

Birds, Cars and Wood

2011-09-18T19:26:00.008Z

Do you like vintage motor cars and wildfowl? Then Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum is the place for you.

I can't say I've ever regarded birds and cars as natural bedfellows for a musuem (and the squashed pheasants on the driveway would seem to vindicate this view), but Bentley does have a strange, indefinable charm. If you're in the area and fancy a walk in beautiful surroundings, I'd recommend it.

I took my wife and sons there today to visit a 'wood fair', which was as worthy and middle class as it sounds, but not quite as dull. My youngest son, who began the visit by sitting on the grass and shouting "I HATE WOOD!" gradually perked up once he realised that it could be deployed as a weapon:

There was a slightly menacing, pre-apocalyptic atmosphere at the wood fair, as if people were preparing themselves for an imminent disaster. In addition to the usual selection of fairly hideous garden ornaments and obscure country crafts, I noticed a lot more knives and survival tools.

I can see the temptation to become self-sufficient in an increasingly uncertain world. But if the oil ran out and things kicked off, what would happen? I once asked a man who was a bit of an old hippy and ran a smallholding what he would do. Without hesitating, he replied: "Find the nearest gun shop and get tooled-up".

It wasn't quiet the answer I was expecting.

To add to the surreal atmosphere, at one point I found myself sitting in the carriage of a miniature railway, travelling at 5mph, discussing The Wire with two 11-year-olds.

At the wood fair we met a couple whose son was in the same class as ours. They had recently moved down from Stoke Newington and I found myself wondering if I would ever meet anyone in Lewes who didn't come from north London. I'm convinced that there is some sort of Stargate-style portal in Hackney that sucks middle-class people in once they have children and sends them off to Lewes, Southwold, North Norfolk and Brighton.

Where do all the real Lewes people go?

Actually, I did recently learn that a friend of my wife's came from St Margarets, only a mile or so from where I grew up in SW London. As children we'd been to the same parks, shops and cinemas, travelled on the same buses and, later, drank in the same pubs, but it had taken her years to bother mentioning where she came from.

There was also something else that she took ages to reveal. Occasionally the friend would mention various members of her family, including a step-mother called Beryl. One day last year, she said that she was worried about her half-sister, as Beryl was dying of cancer and the funeral would probably be quite a big 'do' because Beryl had published a few novels and knew lots of people. My wife nodded sympathetically, then suddenly the penny dropped:

"Hang on, do you mean that Beryl?"

It's strange how we can sometimes talk so much about ourselves without revealling things that others would regard as fundamental.

We had a good chat with the couple from Stoke Newington (at least as good as you can have within the context of constantly of being constantly interrupted by children) and at one point the husband asked me how long we'd lived in Lewes. I realised that it was ten years next month.

"Do you feel local?"

I hesitated and surprised myself with the answer: "No. Not quite. It hasn't happened yet."

My wife disagreed. Ten years of standing in playgrounds twice a day has given her a good network of friends and acquaintances. But my days have tended to involve getting in a car and driving somehere 25 miles away. Whenever I had a drink with someone, it usually took place in London.

Perhaps I need to join something, but I'm not quite sure what.

As we drove back to Lewes, I looked at the clouds over the South Downs and couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I may not be a local yet, but it does feel like home.

That must count for something.

Turning the Key

2011-09-15T15:52:00.005Z

A beautiful day - a tantalising glimpse of the summer we never had. I don't know if it's anything to do with global warming, but the English summer now seems to take place in April and May, with a monsoon season in July and August. It's very odd.

I had to drive to a farm to drop off a cheque for the deposit and first month's rent for Steerforth Books. I had no idea where I was going, but had been given a postcode for the satnav and blindly followed directions which took me onto increasingly narrower and emptier roads. I'd forgotten how sinister the English countryside can be (I blame this on watching reruns of the Avengers).

I ended up driving for miles along a deserted lane, wondering if I was going to end up in a ditch with the satnav lady announcing "You have now reached your destination", whilst some grinning toothless locals began untying the string around their trousers. Fortunately this is Sussex, not the Appalachians.

The farm turned out to be a beautiful, large Georgian house, with breathtaking views of the South Downs. I handed the cheque over and felt a pang of remorse for the fact that I will probably never be able to afford to live somewhere like this.

Driving to the next destination, I listened to a podcast of 'Broadcasting House'. Francesca 'Horrid Henry' Simon, Tori Amos and a bloke whose name I never caught were talking about being in New York on 9/11. More recent events like the invasion of Iraq have faded into the recesses of my memory, but I remember September 11th as if it was yesterday.

I arrived at Steerforth Books. Peter, the gentleman farmer, was out on his tractor doing agricultural things, but another man handed me the key and at last I was able to take possession of the new unit:

It's not big, but if I'm clever about it I think I can get around 8,000 books in this room, which should be enough to generate a reasonable income. I won't get rich - most of the books won't sell - but hopefully the children will have shoes on their feet. The main challenge will be to find enough stock to reach this magic figure. I have a few potential sources.

So Steerforth Books is almost a reality. I have a business account, domain name (com and co.uk), office unit and even a little bit of stock. I can't say that I'm looking forward to the sheer, unmitigated tedium of building 46 feet of shelving (and given my track record in DIY, it will probably collapse at some point), but without it there will be no Steerforth Books.

In the meantime I'm still going into work, three days a week, getting things ready for my successor. It feels strange going through the motions of the working day, making decisions about a future that I won't be part of. I will be glad to leave the world of '9 to 5', but I'll also miss several people more than they probably realise.

In some ways it feels like a very early retirement, leaving the 'real' world of work for a John Bull Printing Set fantasy. But work can simply be work. We don't have to be part of an organisation: commuting, attending meetings and working in open plan offices. Paunches and stomach ulcers are optional, not compulsory.

But whilst a part of me relishes the idea of leaving office life behind, another part feels a deep sense of loss.

No more talking about last night's telly. No more "Did you see the quiz night Phil?", followed by detailed postmortems of 'University Challenge' and 'Only Connect'. I have met some good people through work.

I apologise if this blog has lost its 'mojo' at the moment. The amusing covers and photographs have been thin on the ground recently. I had hoped to publish one final installment of the Derek diaries, but - and you'll have to take my word for this - they are mostly very dull and I have struggled to find any more material that is worth publishing. I haven't completely given up.

So until Steerforth Books is fully established, this blog will limp along like a consumptive war veteran, looking back to better days, hoping (perhaps unrealistically), for better times ahead.

Finally, as far as a Steerforth Books logo is concerned, I have been particularly dim. When I first visited my new farm unit last week, I need only have turned my head 45 degrees to have seen one of the most striking 'logos' of all time:
Nobody knows how old the possibly prehistoric Long Man of Wilmington is, or indeed why it's there, but in theory you can't miss it. I did.

But then one September in 1995, I managed to spend a whole day travelling around Manhattan without noticing the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The next morning I caught an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles, blissfully ignorant of what the future held.

Listening Without Prejudice

2011-09-11T18:32:00.012Z

You may want to just completely skip this post. It's about opera. I won't be offended if you do.

I was looking forward to meeting some old friends in London yesterday, but sadly my stomach had other ideas. Instead, I have spent the weekend in a horizontal position, looking at YouTube clips and catching up with people's blogs.

I found quite a few gems, including this post about Roddy McDowell's home movies, this beautifully-written anecdote and this photograph, which appeals in so many ways.

However, the thing that gave me the most pleasure was finding this (best viewed in full screen mode):

I went to see this performance of Shostakovich's 'Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk District' almost exactly five years ago and wasn't sure what to expect. I had never been to an opera before and had some deeply-held prejudices about overweight singers and overpaid audiences.

I wasn't overjoyed when I discovered that the whole thing lasted for over three hours.

However, it was a truly magical evening and at last, I understood why some people were so fanatical about opera. Aside from Shostakovich's wonderful music, which incensed Stalin so much he banned the opera immediately, I was bowled over by the set design, the costumes and the wonderful singing.

Shostakovich wrote the opera in his 20s and the music buzzes with youthful energy and bawdy humour. I had imagined that the Royal Opera House would attract a rather stuffy crowd, but people were rocking with laughter at the saucy jokes and satirical digs.

I don't like flying, but I'd travel halfway around the world to see this production again. Sadly, the airfare would probably still be cheaper than a seat in the balcony.

All at Sea

2011-09-07T14:54:00.005Z

This morning I found a home for 'Steerforth Books': a small unit within a converted agricultural outbuilding, owned by a gentleman farmer called Peter*.

I had wanted somewhere in Lewes, but this option makes much more financial sense for the time being. The rent is very reasonable and if my business turns out to be an unmitigated disaster, I only have to give a month's notice.

I suppose that I should have visited lots of properties and carefully weighed up the options, but what's the point? I liked the office and I liked Peter. Also, with only three weeks left before I leave the comfortable world of paid employment, I need to get cracking.

I'll hopefully take possession of the unit next week and my first priority will be to install shelving for up to 10,000 books. I had thought of doing the shelves myself, but I've no desire to suffer the same fate as the French composer Alkan, who was killed by a falling bookcase. I think I'll ask an expert.

After the shelving, I need to sort out internet access, buy some desks and chairs and set up seller accounts on marketplaces like Amazon. Once that's done, I can start ordering the stock. None of this will feel real until I actually have some books.

At some point during the next few months, I'll also launch a website. I've been think of a logo and have scoured the internet for images of the original Steerforth from David Copperfield, but this was all I can find:

Steerforth all at sea? I'm not sure if it sends out the right signals.

Does anyone have any bright ideas for a logo or accompanying font? Most of my stock will be general titles from the 20th and late 19th centuries, with a few rare and antiquarian books thrown in. I certainly won't be 'high end', but I don't want to look like the bargain basement either.

What sort of things would you find reassuring or attractive as a buyer if you stumbled across Steerforth Books on the internet?

I'm resigned to opening a Twitter account, wading through the tedium of Google analytics and possibly beginning a new Facebook page (although I think that Facebook has 'jumped the shark').

Failing that, I could go viral with a book-related video on YouTube. 'Happy slapping' is so last decade, so perhaps a flashmob in the reading room of the British Library, or my five-year-old son and his friends dressing up in their Fireman Sam outfits and recreating 'Fahrenheit 451' would grab some attention? I'm not convinced.

Maybe I should just stick to selling good books at a slightly cheaper price than everyone else, wrap them in decent packaging and make sure that they're posted promptly?

Anyway, any suggestions would be much appreciated.

* NB - By 'gentleman farmer', I mean a farmer who is a gentleman, not a man of leisure who dabbles in farming.

The Language Problem

2011-09-03T17:16:00.004Z

During the last year I've been trying to learn French. It has been a struggle, as I'm not very good at learning languages (I achieved the lowest mark for Welsh in the history of the University of Wales). The only time I have been able to pick up a language is when I've been immersed in another culture, cut off from English speakers.

I like to tell myself that this is because I am a musical person who learns aurally rather than visually. But it could just be that I'm bone idle and only pick things up when deprived of any alternative. Either way, in an ideal world I would spend a few months working behind the bar at Chez Jacques, interacting with the locals to the point where, months later, Parisians would be appalled by my strong Toulouse accent.

Sadly, work and family committments have meant that it was unlikely that I would ever be pouring a glass of Ricard for Monsieur Bertillon, so I had to find a compromise.

At one point I joined an evening class, but soon discovered that it was actually a dating agency for middle-aged divorcees, masquerading as an educational course. As an alternative, I tried the traditional book and CD route, but it was really hard to assess how well I'd done. What was the answer?

After a long search, I found an internet course that combined traditional teaching methods (books - remember them?) with videos and exercises, where I could record myself and be assessed by native speakers. I could also join a social networking site and make friends with people in Francophone countries. Parfait!

Unfortunately the reality was a little disappointing. The feedback on my exercises amounted to little more than 'tres bien'! One or two brave souls remarked that my accent wasn't all it could be, but practical tips were thin on the ground.

The social networking didn't quite live up to expectations either:

This young woman is from the Ukraine and, as far as I can tell, doesn't speak French. However, she does have a fine collection of commemorative plates celebrating military helicopters. I'm not sure why she's wearing angel wings.

The French course taught me enough to ask a wide range of questions, but sadly left me completely unprepared for the answers. In some ways, knowing a bit of a language is worse than knowing nothing. It was humiliating.

I have decided to take a break from French for a while and try German, which seems to be easier in many ways, as it's more closely related to English. But there are two possible problems. First, I'm a little concerned that my pronunciation strays too easily into war film German: "Achtung! Fünf, vier, drei, zwei, eins...". Second, they have those terrifyingly long words, like betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung. There's no excuse for that.

Perhaps I should just stick to French. But I'd rather speak three foreign languages badly than one reasonably well.

When I was 26 I went to Lanzarote. I didn't speak a word of Spanish and had an unfortunate incident which ended with me being dumped in a lava field at 2.00 in the morning, surrounded by hostile dogs. It was horrible and I know that if I'd been able to speak some Spanish, however badly, things would have been different.

(Fortunately, after wandering across the lava field for an hour, I was rescued by some local lads in a jeep who helped me find my house, driving at ridiculous speeds in the dark, along dirt tracks with terrifying vertiginous slopes. Once we found where I was staying, I invited them in for a drink and as they left, one of them suddenly handed me a huge lump of dope and said, with a grin, "See you in Hell")

After that experience, I learned some Spanish and reached a point where, a few years later in Chile, I was able to book hotel rooms and train tickets in Spanish over the phone. It was exhilirating.

But unless you have a particular affinity with one nation or linguistic group, does it make sense to limit your options? Wouldn't it be better to learn the essential 1000 words in several languages, unless you're one of those nauseating people who are naturally fluent in six languages? In the early part of the 20th century, some people would have had a simple answer: Esperanto.

Sadly, Esperanto is largely forgotten and I wouldn't be surprised if the most popular artificial language of today is Klingon. What a waste of time.

If anyone has any tips for learning a language that don't involve working in a bar for a year, I'd be interested to hear them.

A Day Out

2011-08-29T18:20:00.006Z

Last week we travelled up to East Anglia to visit my wife's great-aunt for lunch. It was a ridiculously long drive in torrential rain, during which I battled to resist the soporific effect of the windscreen wipers and a Noel Coward play on the radio. At one point, everyone else in the car was asleep and I only had the 'satnav' lady to keep me company, with her annoying rising inflection: "At the next roundabout? Take the second exit? Then take the road to Lowestoft?"

I'd never visited the great-aunt's house before, but had wondered why such a nice, cultured woman lived in a place like Lowestoft. In addition to being the easternmost point of Great Britain, Lowestoft is one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. It has a terrible reputation.

However, as the satnav announced "You have reached your destination?", I entered a leafy road full of beautiful Victorian villas and realised how blinkered I had been. Lowestoft may be economically depressed due to problems in the fishing industry, but like Hastings and Margate, it is largely unspoiled and has retained its character. All it needs now is a high-speed rail link to north London and a modern art gallery.

From the outside, the great-aunt's house seemed untouched by the 20th century, let alone the 21st; I almost expected a maid to appear at the door. But I didn't think that the Victorian theme would continue once we were inside:

This photo doesn't do justice to the beauty of this house. The great-aunt's son - an antiques restorer and dealer - has filled the house with beautiful objects and said that he tries to lead a plastic-free existence.

He and his sister had prepared a lavish candlelit lunch, with fine bone china, silver cutlery and lead crystal glasses. With a grandfather clock ticking gently in the background, it felt as if we were still waiting for 1900 to arrive.

I complimented the son on a beautiful sideboard, which looked as if it should be in a museum. He replied that he had bought it when he was 16. What sort of teenager goes around buying antique furniture? Later, I learned that when he was in his teens, the son and his best friend used to dress up as Queen Victoria and drink tea from very expensive china.

I was also told that when the son was sent to Austria on a school skiing trip that he didn't want to go on, he used to sneak away from the ski slopes and spend the whole day in the local village, buying objets d'art and porcelain. When the son's deception was discovered, the master took him to one side and said "Do you know what a homosexual is?"

I left the house feeling inspired by what I'd seen, but depressed by the ordinariness of my own home. I used to seek out beautiful things, but as soon as I became a parent I stopped bothering. I could blame it on money, but several of the objects I saw in Lowestoft had come from car boot sales.

I think it was more to do with the belief that a self-indulgent period in my life was over and it was time to create a more child-centred home, full of clean, new utilitarian furniture. What nonsense. Have my son's lives been enhanced by a glut of plastic toys and flatpack self-assembly furniture?

I still have a few things that I value: a Swedish barometer with art noveau lettering, some chairs that used to belong to Jade Jagger, a Victorian clock with a plaque dedicated to 'Mr and Mrs Ashdown of the Plumtree Ragged School' and an old bakelite phone that was owned by the BBC.

But overall, I have allowed too much junk to creep into my life. I look longingly at blogs like Grey Area and marvel at the beauty of other people's homes.

Luckily, my house is so strange anyway, that no amount of flatpack furniture could completely destroy its character, but it deserves better than an Ikea table and an Argos chest of drawers. As I'm about to embark on my new career as the Lovejoy of books, perhaps I should add antiques to my portfolio.

Grey is the Colour of Hope

2011-08-27T20:36:00.003Z

I popped into the Colchester branch of Waterstone's this morning to see if the recent change of ownership had made any difference. At first, it looked exactly the same, but then I noticed that the shelves seemed much fuller and there were very few annoying posters with banal bylines.

It felt more like a bookshop.

I suppose it was unrealistic to expect anything dramatic; after all, James Daunt's only been in the job for a couple of months. I shall have to go back later in the year.

I must have been scrutinising the shop a little too conspicuously, as a nervous-looking assistant made a beeline for me and asked if I needed any help. I think they thought that I was a mystery shopper. I was tempted to play along and start asking ridiculous question, but thought better of it.

I've never been a mystery shopper, but I used to pretend to be a restaurant critic. I'd dress smartly and turn up with a small clipboard, pretending to surreptitiously take notes which I made a great play of concealing every time a waiter approached. After ordering, I'd inspect the loos and ensure that I 'accidentally' walked into the kitchen, scanning the surfaces for any signs of dirt. As the evening progressed the waiters became increasingly attentive and at some point, I'd invariably end up getting at least one free drink (a decent one, not a thimblefull of Bailey's).

At the end of the visit, the waiters would wait by the door and, with anxious smiles, ask me if I'd had an enjoyable evening. I'd nod knowingly and reply "A very enjoyable evening indeed." Their relief was palpable.

Was that wrong? I never actually claimed to be anything I wasn't; I just let people infer it from my behaviour. Either way, it was good fun.

But I digress. Returning to Waterstone's, the shop looked good and it was packed, so perhaps there's still some hope for the high street bookshop. I hope so. The way everyone is talking about the 'Kindle', it feels as if the question about the demise of bricks and mortar bookselling is not if, but when.

However, I have uncovered evidence of a failed attempt at Kindle-style reading from the 1940s:

This book was published during the Second World War and although it looks perfectly ordinary on the outside, the contents reveal a bold new initiative in the publishing world. Black on grey:

"Black text on a grey background? It'll never work, Carstairs. It looks damnably awful!"

And that was the end of that. The book industry had to wait another 65 years before the Kindle made grey backgrounds acceptable.

But sometimes grey can be good:

I love cover designs like this from the 1960s, which have an elegance, simplicity and wit that has never been surpassed. In this post, Richard from Grey Area posted a comment that pointed out how much work went into creating such seemingly effortless designs.

Just a few years before 'Choral Verse', dustjackets like this were the norm:

This is a sex education book for young people from the late 1950s. I'm no expert on these matters, but I would have thought that the first thing they could do is take their raincoats off.

But I mustn't mock. It's actually quite a good book, full of dangerous, radical ideas, like trying to see things from the woman's perspective.

I'm not sure if these women needed any advice with delicate matters:

In the second picture, the urban sophisticate deals with a group of 'brigands' with barbed wit and condescension. I've tried that approach too, but with more mixed results.

There's something very appealing about the demi-monde of the period between the wars, but I'm also attracted to the innocence of children's book illustrations from the mid-20th century:

I expect that these children were called Peter, Joan, Colin and Kenneth and their parents didn't mind them sitting on the edge of tall buildings in the dark, because they were too busy getting 'tight' at the local yacht club.

Finally, four photos that turned up at work last week:

A very moody shot. Perhaps it's all a little too English for this gentleman.

The sporting Scotsmen theme continues with this appealing portrait of a young boy.

This couple are also from Scotland, but there's no evidence of any sporting activity.

Finally, a slightly disturbing portrait of Father Christmas:

I'm not sure what effect this Santa would have had on the young visitors to his grotto, but I'm sure that it can't have been as bad as the New York department store that had a sign outside which promised: 'FIVE SANTAS. NO WAITING.'

Decline and Fall

2011-08-24T21:18:00.006Z

My leaving date at work is now official and people seem more shocked than I thought they would be. Everyone has been very kind, but I could have done without the two colleagues who asked me if I was retiring.

Do I really look that old?

Admitedly it's been a hard year, but I didn't think I looked that bad. I have a good 20 years left before I retire (probably longer, if the Government have their way) and can't say I feel like someone who's about to draw their pension.

Perhaps I'm fooling myself. In the spirit of objectivity, I took this 'warts and all' photo of myself an hour ago:

It's a sad contrast to the photo in my last post. I am a shadow of my former self: hair has been lost and weight has been gained, but does this really look like someone who is about to retire?

I only hope that they meant early retirement. Very early retirement.

Things didn't get any better today. I had an appointment at the optician's and was pleased to see that my eye test was being done by a very attractive woman. She had long blonde hair, a strange tattoo on her leg and a breathy voice that sounded as if she was acting very badly. For a moment I thought I'd been transported into a porn film and waited patiently for her to complain how hot the room was and start loosening her clothing. But instead she began telling me that I had reached the age where I should consider getting varifocal lenses.

Varifocal lenses? Great! While I'm at it, I might as well order some Werther's Originals, a waterproof mattress cover and a boxed DVD set of 'Last of the Summer Wine'.

I need a holiday. But not here:

Preferably somewhere warm and exotic, like these photos from 1979:

I found these pictures in an old Selfix photo album that turned up at work last week. Sadly, they weren't actual photographs, but pictures that someone had cut out of a holiday brochure - a whole album's worth. Why would someone go to so much effort?

Why not relax with a complimentary glass of Dubonet and a cigarette, while Jacques plays 'Misty' for you, before boogieing the night away to the latest Patrick Juvet smash hit...

And in the morning you can sample the local crafts and historical buildings...

After lunch, why not not take advantage of our exclusive 'Members Only' club facilities? If tennis isn't your scene, you can relax with the latest Harold Robbins in our new library room...

It looks like the sort of place where you'd bump into Roger Moore.

Anyway, I must go now before the cocoa boils over.

(Now where did I put my slippers?)

N.B - Since writing this post, I have been out for curry with a lovely person 41 years older than me. She drank me under the table. I need to listen to Dale Carnegie: 'Stop Worrying and Start Living'!

Prospects

2011-08-22T18:41:00.009Z

My wife has taken our sons to her mother's house on an island off the coast of Essex. For the first time in ages, I can hear nothing but the sound of death watch beetles and the floorboards expanding and contracting as the sun rises and falls. It is a guilty pleasure.

When I first met my wife, I refused to believe that there was an island off the coast of Essex. It all sounded too Enid Blyton. Then I went to stay with her and visited her grandparents' vast Tudor farmhouse. I'd never been to a home with a grand piano before, let alone two (the second one was in the nursery) and felt as if I'd been sent to live in a novel.

My wife's grandparents' heyday was in the 1940s and 50s. Fifty years on, the men still wore pencil-thin moustaches and drank double whiskies, before staggering into their Rovers for the drive home at a steady 23mph. It seemed such a solid world and I felt overwhelmed by it. But within only a few years they were all dead and the Tudor farmhouse, which echoed with the sound of glasses clinking, risqué jokes and druken renditions of 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square', was silent.

It was a world of certainties and a sense of belonging: the yacht club, the Masons, the Conservatives and the golf club. If there was a dinner dance, Nanny looked after the children. Later, boarding school ensured that the social calendar went ahead without any disruptions.

I wonder what my wife's grandparents made of me, with my strange boots and long black coats, all bought from charity shops:

I looked a total prat. But to their credit, my wife's grandparents were never anything less than charming. I suppose they'd seen it all before.

My wife's grandfather once took her to one side and asked what my 'prospects' were. She roared with laughter. I'm not sure if she's laughing now, living in a house that's less than a fifth of the size of the one she grew up in, but luckily she still feels relieved that she didn't end up with a nice young man from the yacht club.

My prospects are still uncertain. I hope that 'Steerforth Books' will at least pay the bills and put bread on the table, but there is still a lot of work to be done. I have 39 days left before I leave the security of salaried employment for the terra incognita of running a business.

Oddly enough, I don't feel at all worried.

I'm in Love With Joanne Woodward

2011-08-19T21:38:00.006Z

I've just had one of those aimless evenings spent looking at random YouTube clips. I always end up feeling guilty. Another wasted day. Why didn't I spend my time reading a novel or watching an Ingmar Bergman film, rather than typing 'skateboarding chimps' in the search box?

I blame it on stress.

But I find that if you spend enough time on YouTube, you invariably stumble on something wonderful.

This evening I started looking at clips of 'What's My Line' from the late 1950s and early 60s, marvelling at the quality of the guests, e.g. Salvador Dali, Alfred Hitchcock and Eleanor Roosevelt. No E-list former reality tv contestants or failed pop stars, although there was a slightly bizarre appearance from Colonel Sanders (who looked exactly like the Kentucky Fried Chicken picture).

My favourite 'What's My Line' clip featured Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. I remember reading articles about Newman and Woodward's marriage and the subtext was always "here's a man who could have any woman he wants and yet he's chosen to remain faithful to his wife who, let's face it, is no glamourpuss, although she's a formidable character..."

However, on the strength of this clip, I can see exactly why Paul Newman fell in love with Joanne Woodward and remained happily married to her until his death. Apart from being beautiful and elegant, she radiates intelligence, wit and a sense of fun.

I think I'm a bit in love with Joanne Woodward too:

N.B - Since writing this post, I've discovered that there are rumours that Dorothy Killgalen - described by Frank Sinatra as the 'chinless wonder' - may have been assassinated!

ABC

2011-08-14T10:09:00.004Z

I must admit I'd been having sleepless nights about handing my notice in. How would my employers react? I knew that they regarded me as a permanent fixture and had planned accordingly. Would they be angry, indifferent or sympathetic?

So far, everyone has been brilliant. Indeed, they've even offered to help me find a way of setting-up in Lewes and I've been told that if my circumstances change, I can go back. I couldn't ask for more.

Now comes the hard bit. I have to find a unit in Lewes that's large enough to store a few thousand books. It doesn't matter what state of repair the building's in as long as it's dry. It also needs to be accessible for lorries and vans. Finally, I need a short lease in case I turn out to be utterly useless at running my own business.

In the meantime, I will be in my current job for at least another month, paving the way for my successor, so I'll continue to share the latest discoveries:

This book appears to be very rare. I can't find any other copies of it on sale. The flyleaf has a Guernsey bookseller's name blind-stamped in the corner, whilst the front endpaper has this bookplate:

I was surprised to find a bookplate for an English prize in French, but later realised that it was actually in Guernésiais - a Norman French dialect that remained the island's official language until 1972. Today, only 2% of the population speak it fluently, but when Victor Hugo was in exile on Guernsey, writing Les Miserables, Guernésiais was commonly spoken.

The language declined for the usual reasons, but was accelerated when many of the island's children were evacuated to the British mainland at the beginning of World War two.

As for the book, it has some beautiful colour illustrations accompanying a military-themed ABC:

Can you guess what each letter stands for? I've already thought of some (which are unrepeatable).

In addition to the ABC illustrations, there are also some full colour plates:

The final scene clearly shows that rioting isn't a modern phenomenon, but in the Victorian age they disguised themselves with clown suits instead of hoodies. The police response doesn't appear to have changed very much.

That's the nearest I get to writing about the riots. I have very strong opinions about why they happened and what could be done to prevent future unrest, but like most of the UK population I didn't witness any of these disturbances. I've lived in thoroughly middle-class Lewes for ten years and London feels a world away.

Maybe it's time for me to go to Tottenham and get down with the kids.

Change

2011-08-11T18:46:00.009Z

A month or so ago my managing director walked up to my desk and asked me to come into his office. My heart started beating quickly. Suddenly, I was eight years old again, worrying that I had unwittingly transgressed one of the grown-ups’ rules. Had they discovered that I hadn’t ordered my post-it notes from the preferred supplier?

I did the walk of shame through the vast open-plan office and noticed eyes quickly dart in my direction. I tried to look as nonchalant as possible, but sensed that my face was glowing. It had to be bad news.

I sat down and listened to what sounded like a preamble to something unpleasant. The managing director showed me a series of spreadsheets with figures that seemed to merge into each other and talked about budgets and long-term strategies. Then he came to the point. My department was now the most profitable part of the business and it was time to think about the future.

It slowly dawned on me that this wasn’t bad news. I listened as my managing director talked about expansion, moving to a separate building and investing in the project, realising that this was actually very good news for me. At last, I had the potential to earn some serious money.

But I felt utterly miserable. Why?

At first I couldn’t understand why I had reacted so badly, but on reflection it made perfect sense. Things had changed. My son and mother needed me more than ever and even though my employers had been very understanding, the 9 to 5 routine no longer made any sense. I needed to work in Lewes; preferably for myself, as this would give me the flexibility that I needed.

Today I handed in my resignation. In October I will be self-employed for the first time in my life. The whole thing feels unreal and slightly terrifying, but I am absolutely certain that I have made the right decision.

I will need to have enough money to pay for food and bills, so I’m planning to do what I do now on a smaller scale: Steerforth Books. I’ve also been offered a few pieces of work by other people, so I hope that between running a small business and doing a few short-term projects, I’ll survive.

I may just have made one of the silliest decisions of my life, but somehow I don't think so.

(By the way, this blog is five years old today. It began almost by accident – a nasty bout of food poisoning from bad oysters left me bed-ridden for two weeks and out of sheer boredom, I created a blog. It would have probably been swiftly abandoned, but Ms Baroque generously responded to my fatuous first post and I was hooked. I couldn’t quite believe that you could type any old nonsense on your laptop and with minutes, complete strangers would come up with pertinent, thought-provoking observations. It was wonderful.

Thank you to everyone who has posted comments over the years. I only wish that we could all meet up in a pub one day. I have met a few bloggers in the flesh and, without exception, they have been even more likeable and interesting than their blog selves.)

Today's Favourite Book Blurb

2011-08-09T12:06:00.008Z

This comes from 'The Shadow of Happiness', by Betty Manvers:

'MIRANDA MARKHAM, who has lived all her life in a London suburb with her father, never travelling any further than the coast for her annual holiday, suddenly learns that her mother, who she has always believed died when she was very young, is the talented concert pianist Miriam Sarelle. Miriam has been mauled by a lion while on safari in Africa, and the radio reports that her right arm has had to be amputated. Gerald Markham, Miranda's father, asks her to go out to Africa to Miriam, who he feels will be in need of someone of her own. He has never ceased to love her since she left him twenty years previously. The first person Miranda meets on arrival at Livingstone is Brett Craybourne, the big game hunter who has organized the safari on which Miranda had been hurt; she falls in love with him, but realises that there is little hope of her love being reciprocated...'

It sounds a corker.

I'm glad that Miriam managed to hang on to the left arm. At least she could still perform this piece:

The Roaring Twenties

2011-08-03T17:39:00.007Z

The 1920s might have roared for some people, but probably not for the subjects of a photo album I found yesterday:

Although I was born in the 1960s, this image feels very familiar to me. When I was a boy, there was a shoe shop in the road next to mine that had been opened by two brothers in the 1930s. It occupied the ground floors of two adjacent houses. One half contained a shoe repair workshop, where the brothers could usually be found; the other contained a showroom with countless boxes of shoes. I used to buy my Clarks Commandos there.

The workshop was like a time capsule. Nothing had been changed for 50 years and the fixture and fittings were all painted in a shade of brown that had probably become obsolete in 1949.

Even when the brothers were in their seventies, they continued to work, buffing leather shoes over ancient lathes. They finally retired in the early 1990s.

I love this idyllic photograph for so many reasons. It was about to be binned, so I'm very glad that it will now be seen by more people than ever.

I receive lots of old photograph albums at work. Many contain nothing more than snapshots which are of little interest to anyone; but the best have images that are either historically or artistically appealing. This photo may just be the work of an amateur who was having an 'artistic moment', but it doesn't deserve to be consigned to oblivion.

Is that graffiti? So much for the good old days.

This is a slightly creepy photograph: a man who looks like a waxwork dummy and a woman holding a doll. Very odd.

This is a bit of a Caspar David Friedrich scene, with the protagonist squaring up against the forces of nature.

This is a rare, naturalistic 'Monday is washday' scene. No Sunday best here.

A ridiculously large hat.

The first recorded sighting of a Kindle.

This is a very touching photo (assuming that rabbit stew was not on the menu).

This pensive pose is an early example of flash photography (look at the shadow in the background).

This Danny Kaye lookalike would have loved a full-blown Hammond organ. Perhaps he lived long enough to see one.

Finally, a picnic scene. The location and identity of these people will always be a mystery - I wish that I could transport myself back there, as they look as if they're having fun.

When I was 20, I met an elderly Welsh farmer on the outskirts of Lampeter. He looked at me and said "Ydych yn siarad Cymraeg?"I replied that I knew a little (I'd worked in a Welsh-speaking pub during the National Eisteddfod of Wales), but it would be a very limited conversation. He immediately switched to English and, like a man possessed, told me that I must sort out my photos:

"Write the names and dates on the back of all of your photographs. I've got albums and I don't know who they are. It's gone. Forgotten. I can't tell my sons who these people are. They're strangers. You need to write everything down."

I promised him that I wouldn't forget and I'm glad that the internet has given me the opportunity to repeat this man's sage advice.

Island Life

2011-08-01T21:32:00.003Z

I have just returned from a slightly odd five-day trip to the Isle of Wight, house-sitting for a complete stranger that my wife had met through Mumsnet.

My oldest son didn't want to go. After years of being warned about the dangers of chatting to strangers online, he was convinced that we were being lured to our deaths by a Belgian psychopath. It was only when I casually mentioned that the house had a Wii and Xbox that he began to change his tune.

The last time I went to the Isle of Wight I was six months old. Several people commented that very little had changed since my last visit. Of course this isn't true, but the four miles of water that separates the Island (as the locals refer to it) from the English mainland does give the place a very separate identity, almost as if it inhabits an alternate reality.

It's not quite Britain in the 1950s, but it doesn't feel like the 21st century either.

Here are a few things I loved about the Isle of Wight:

1. The walk to the Needles Old Battery:

It's almost a mile from the car park to the Victorian coastal defence at the southwestern tip of the island - not a huge distance, but enough to deter the hoi polloi from ruining the tranquil atmosphere.

2. The Isle of Wight Railway:

Where else would you find a 1938 tube train in the middle of the English countryside? This isn't a 'heritage' line for tourists, but a genuine passenger service, using reconditioned London Underground rolling stock.

The journey from Ryde begins in a long tunnel and for a minute, listening to the the familiar clunks and whirs of the electric motors, it feels as if you're on the District Line approaching Sloane Square. When the train emerges into the English countryside, the juxtaposition of such unlikely elements feels like a very strange dream:

London Underground stations look nothing like this.

Or this:

3. Red Squirrels:

You can't see them, but they can see you. Unlike their big, brash American cousins, who now dominate the mainland, the native British squirrel is petite and discreet. I had to wait patiently in some dense undergrowth before I was rewarded with my David Attenborough moment: a red squirrel (tiny little thing) resting on a branch, making a series of strange squeals and clicks.

The next day I nearly ran one over.

I expect the BNP like the Isle of Wight. It's almost entirely white working class (I struggled in vain to find my favourite brand of balsamic vinegar), with very few of those annoying, Guardian-reading London types like me who push the property prices up with their art galleries and organic cafes. Even the squirrels are thoroughly British.

4. The Roman Villa in Newport:

Actually it's quite boring and I feel sorry for anyone who has got excited by the brown sign announcing a 'Roman Villa', only to find themselves looking at a floor. It's a very nice floor, with lots of impressive mosaics, but it's not a villa. I'm sure that people have been prosecuted for less misleading descriptions.

However, what I liked about the Roman villa in Newport is its incongruous location, situated in a dull-looking bungalow in a quiet residential road, a few doors down from the house we were staying in. Apparently the villa strays into next door's garden, but the previous owners didn't want to ruin their patio and it remains buried to this day.

5. Osborne House

This was Queen Victoria's favourite residence because it provided a sanctuary from a world in which she was routinely "mobbed by crowds", enabling her to enjoy a relatively normal life with her husband and children.

The coast of mainland England is visible from the gardens, but reassuringly distant:

The interior of the house wasn't my cup of tea: hideously opulent furnishings and objets d'art, complemented with badly-lit, poorly-executed oil paintings by forgotten masters. It didn't help that I kept bumping into an annoying mother and daughter, who made loud, confident pronouncements like "They didn't have magazines in the Victorian times."

The daughter was probably ten years younger than me, but every time we reached a staircase she wheezed and complained with each step. Instead of advising her daughter to eat fewer doughnuts, the mother agreed.

I had almost given up hope of seeing anything I liked, but Queen Victoria's bedroom more than made up for the disappointment of the rest of the house. To see the bed where Victoria died and look up at the ceiling decorations that she must have stared at countles times was very moving. I tried to imagine the scene - only 110 years ago - in which the dying Queen was attended to by her servants, physician and loved ones, but just as I started to lose myself, the mother and daughter appeared:

"Oh yes, she was a very respectful lady..."

Fortunately they didn't stay long. But as they left, two attendants decided to begin a detailed comversation about their dogs' health and the resulting vet bills. I gave up.

One other thing I liked about Osborne House was the gallery devoted to Indian nobles. It looked as if Queen Victoria took her role as Empress of India very seriously, devoting several rooms to portraits of maharajas and artifacts from the subcontinent.

I had no idea that Victoria went to great pains to learn Urdu and a display case showed a page from an exercise book in which she had written several passages in the local script. Perhaps the recent memory of the Indian Mutiny had prompted a more respectful attitude on the part of the British.

But even if you don't like vulgar, excessively ornate 19th century interiors, Osborne House is worth visiting for the beauty of its grounds. The formal gardens had an idyllic, arcadian quality; like a ruined Greek temple:

However, at the edge of the grounds through a gap in the trees, I caught a glimpse of my true arcadia:

6. Carisbrooke Castle:

There isn't much to say about Carisbrooke Castle; it's just a beautiful place with a wonderful panorama of the surrounding countryside. Charles I was held prisoner here after Parliament had won the English Civil War and although it can't have been a terribly happy time for him, at least he had a room with a view:

After exploring the grounds, I went to the tea shop and ordered a cup of tea and a slice of cake (it's a rock n'roll life). Instead, I got a pot of tea and a huge wedge of Victoria sponge. No wonder there's an obesity crisis.

I've noticed that portions have doubled in size over the last 20 years, with a standard packet of crisps going from 20g to 40g. I can understand why this has happened: a manufacturer who sells a 15p slice of cake for £1.70 can now sell a 30p wedge of Victoria sponge for £3.40, making almost £2 additional profit for doubling the portion.

But the end result is that I'm stuck on a staircase behind a 30 year-old woman who is wheezing like a consumptive war veteran. It's not good.

In the tea shop, I was joined by a couple who spoke in a loud nasal accent about how "taahribly entrahsted" they were in the Castle's past:

"In Tennesse we met a chap who claimed that he was descended from one of the signatories of Charle's I's death warrant. He seemed convinced that because of this he wouldn't be allowed into England and nothing we said could change his mind..."

There was a pause.

"Still, perhaps he wouldn't be let in for other reasons! Hwah, hwah, hwah!"

I was happy in Carisbrooke Castle, but all my sons wanted to do was go back to the house and continue playing with the Wii. My youngest son complained that "you're taking us out all the time. This is the worst day of my life since the start of the world."

It was very frustrating to realise that all my sons wanted to do was stay in and play computer games. I'd vaguely entertained the idea of buying a Wii - I'd fallen for the marketing spiel about getting families to play together, but it's bollocks. All of these games suck the imagination dry, replacing original thought with predetermined scenarios and ghastly soundtracks that repeat the same leitmotifs, ad nauseum.

Worst of all, I was also becoming addicted to the Wii. When, on the last morning, I realised that I was the first person to wake up, I crept downstairs to see if I could beat the high score in Wii Sports. I'd developed a genuine dislike of a character called Martin, who kept stopping me get to the next level. I had a score to settle with him:

But I haven't completely lost hope. I'd say that the moment when we were all at our happiest was on a summer's evening, walking along the cliff tops to the Old Needles Battery. Away from the distractions of the Wii and the temptations of 'family' theme parks (our one vist to a theme park lasted for a mere 15 minutes, as a girl vomitted in front of us within 10 seconds of arriving and my son got stung by a bee), we managed to find our 'mojo'.

Sometimes the best things in life are free.

The Stephen Fry Mystery

2011-07-24T13:58:00.008Z

This morning, I took my younger son to a rather strange open air museum of industrial archaeology which, given its mostly odd-looking visitors and large collection of redundant machinery, felt like some sort of post-apocalyptic settlement. I liked it.

However, on the way there, I passed somewhere that was far superior in the post-apocalyptic stakes: Shoreham Cement Works. Closed in 1991, the works consist of two huge abandoned factories that look like something out of Tarkovsky's masterpiece, Stalker.

On the western side of a road that cuts through the works, there is an abandoned office building:

As you can see, there is some writing on the wall under the top row of windows:

'FRY "POSH" BORE'?

Why would somebody go to the effort of breaking into an abandoned factory next to a rural minor road, just so that they could paint an anti-Stephen Fry slogan?

I know that Fry's status as a 'national treasure' isn't universally accepted, but this seems a rather strange form of protest. The only suspect that springs to mind - Simon Gray - died three years ago.

It's a mystery.

Also, haven't they heard of Twitter? Stephen Fry certainly has.

The Colourful 1890s

2011-07-22T21:58:00.009Z

I was going to call this post 'Dr Barnardo's Bubbles', but then I remembered all of those annoying, possessive book titles that seemed to be a craze in the publishing world after 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', so I decided against it.

Yesterday I found a children's annual from the 1890s, edited by Dr Barnardo. Like many annuals of this period, it contains a selection of mawkish, sentimental short stories and rather dull, worthy articles. This copy was given as a present to a boy called Herbert:

It's a brief message, but in true Victorian fashion, Mrs Thwaite Metcalfe manages to squeeze in a quick reference to her son's eventual demise.

I wonder what Herbert thought when he unwrapped his present from Mama on Christmas Day? Perhaps his heart sank when he saw that the package was book-shaped, rather than toy steam engine-shapped. However, he might have changed his mind once he opened the pages, as this is no ordinary annual.

Unlike most books of this period, 'Bubbles' is packed with attractive, full page colour illustrations covering a variety of themes: fairy tales, Bible stories, scenes from the Empire and portraits of the deprivation and poverty that Barnardo fought to alleviate. In the 1890s, it must have seemed miraculous.

It has been observed that if you want to really want to get the flavour of a particular period, you should eschew great art in favour of the second rate, the ephemeral and the commercial. I'm not completely convinced by this argument, but the following illustrations probably tell us a lot more about late-Victorian society than any Van Gogh painting:

And finally, here is the back cover:

I'm sure that young Herbert loved these bright, colourful illustrations. But I bet he never read the short stories.

"Life is Better When You Know More"

2011-07-20T17:09:00.015Z

This post contains a random selection of things that have turned up at work during the last week.

I suspect that most of them have come from house clearances. Some are book-related, but many aren't and I often wonder how they ever make it as far as my desk. However, I'm glad that they do.

First, a 1960s maths textbook. Although I'm a child of the 70s, I vaguely remember covers like this one. I took them for granted at the time, but today I'm struck by how well designed they are:

Much better than this drab, utilitarian cover from a decade earlier:

I wonder if Brian was aware that he was the object of passionate desires?

Staying in the 1950s, I found a 1951 children's annual and when I opened it, this was the first thing I saw:

Okay, I thought, values have changed and I mustn't jump to conclusions. I'll try another page:

At this point I gave up.

In another 1950s book, I found a leaflet advertising the Chambers Encyclopaedia:

I don't think any of us would take issue with that. But in a list of reasons why learning is good, I wonder how many people would come up with the fifth point:

"So, why do you want to enrol on this degree course Mr Pettigrew?"

"Because I wish to increase my television enjoyment."

The leaflet was used as a bookmark, as was this envelope addressed to my favourite actor, Paul Scofield:

Sadly the letter was missing.

I'm sure that Paul Scofield would have enjoyed this shocking photo:

Victorians caught on camera smiling and playing cards. Outrageous!

Next, five portraits of someone on the journey from childhood to adulthood (alternate title: from hairdo to hairdon't):

And they say the 70s was the decade that style forgot! However, mullets aside, I found these photos fascinating. Most of us have albums that depict our own tortuous paths to adulthood, but the evidence is usually too gradual and cluttered with extraneous detail to convey the magitude of this great transformation.

These photos starkly convey the huge, sometimes terrifying changes that we undergo. I only wish that these pictures covered ten years instead of five.

However, by coincidence I discovered this fascinating sequence of portraits of a girl, taken between 1970 and 1982. I'd just watched a 1970s children's programme on DVD and Googled the names of the cast to see what had happened to them. The younger actors seemed to vanish into obscurity, but one of them - Shelley Crowhurst - popped up on the website of photographer Howard Grey.

Finally, while I can accept that photos, diaries and leaflets are book-related, what about this:

As someone in the warehouse said "80 bob? That's £4! A lot of money in those days."

Why did it end up on my desk? Because, I later found out, someone in the warehouse thought that I was the sort of person who'd probably have a projector. They were right!

It took a while to find my dad's old cine projector amongst the collection of things in the loft that I never use, but can't bring myself to throw away. However, after a long search, this afternoon I watched 'Flat Mates'. I appreciated its subversive narrative structure - the women are naked at the beginning but become increasingly clothed as the film progresses - but felt that it was let down by the cinematography and direction.

Overall, it has been a strange week, but rarely dull.

Moved

2011-07-16T17:14:00.010Z

Last Friday my mother left the home she has lived in since 1963 (she knows where she was when Kennedy died) and moved to a sheltered accommodation flat in Lewes. I had no idea how she was going to react to the change and worried that beyond her facade of stoic resignation, my mother might feel utterly miserable, but to my relief she seems blissfully happy in her new home. It's as if she has been released from a terrible burden.

The process of moving was quite frenetic. I'd been given ten days' notice and, in addition to working full time, I had to find a removal company, decorate the flat, get a carpet laid, install an electric cooker and assemble several kits of flatpack furniture.

Finding a removal company was particularly difficult: three answerphones (one of which had a 'comedy' message) and a wrong number. The final call also seemed liked a wrong number, as the phone was answered by an aristocratic gentleman called Peter,who sounded as if he'd taken too many drugs in the 60s.

The phone call began awkwardly, as Peter seemed reluctant to commit himself to anything, including the nature of his business. Perahps it was a wrong number, but I was desperate. Could Peter move my mother's possessions to Lewes? After many awkward silences and strange noises in the background, Peter said that he probably would be free on July 8th, but needed to check a few details. Could he phone me back in the evening?

A day passed and I hadn't heard a thing from Peter. I phoned him:

"Ah yes, Mr...er...I'm glad you phoned me because I don't appear to have your number. Anyway, July 11th should be fine in Storrington. What? July 8th in Teddington? Oh...well I'll have to check my diary...hmm...hmm...yes, that should be fine too."

My heart sank.

To move couldn't have been simpler: 30 boxes, three chairs and one fridge, but when Peter - a portly, ruddy-faced man in his late 50s - arrived an hour late (only a minute before my mother ceased to be the legal owner of her house), he seemed overwhelmed by the task ahead of him.

"You said there were 20 boxes," he complained. I patiently pointed out that they were very small boxes and would have filled 20 normal ones, but he was determined to feel hard done by, pointedly refering to the refrigerator as the "fridge-freezer", as if we'd deceived him.

My mother turned to me and in a whisper that you could hear 50 yards away, said "He's a drinker."

Suddenly a van door opened and a young man walked up the garden path. "This is my er...son," explained Peter. The young man said nothing, but slowly started to rearrange the boxes as if he was playing Tetris. This was going to take all day.

I went up to my bedroom for the last time. To my surprise, my life there flashed before my eyes in a slightly crass, cinematic manner. All that was missing was a soundtrack - maybe the oboe and harp version of the Crossroads theme tune that they used to play during particularly sad moments.

I thought of the time I first discovered Radio Four, when I was eight, and listened in the dark to Mrs Rochester's terrifying wails. I also remembered the patterned wallpaper that seemed to come alive and dance in the semi-dark; recording songs from the Top 20 on Sunday evenings; practising scales on my new piano, recovering from my first hangover; listening to late night phone-ins on LBC; being cold; the sound of trains trundling past; reading Enid Blyton by torchlight; and, when I was two, being carried around the house by Dad to show me that there were no strangers hiding.

I closed the door and said goodbye.

I went downstairs and told Peter that we were going to leave. We would wait for them in Lewes. All Peter had to do was leave the door on the latch and shut it behind him when he left. What could possibly go wrong?

Mum and I got in the car and as I turned the key in the ignition, I realised that this was it. We could never go back. I had expected this to be an emotional moment for my mother, but she was too preoccupied with an anecdote about Auntie Betty to even notice. I interupted Mum and said that we should say goodbye to the house. She looked back briefly and said "The funny thing is, I don't feel anything. I just want to get to the new place."

When I had arrived, all that Mum was concerned about was being able to make a cup of tea for the removal men. It took quite a lot of persuading before she agreed to let me pack the kettle and tea bags. Later, as we joined the M25, she said "Well, I'm glad I didn't make him a cup of tea now. He's absolutely useless. I wouldn't be surprised if he locks himself out of the house."

After 40 miles, the hazy outline of the South Downs appeared in the distance. It had been raining heavily for most of the journey and I worried about my mother's chairs getting wet. But as we drew closer to Lewes, the clouds broke and the sun appeared. "This is a good sign," my mother said.

As we entered the hall of the flats, I felt like a nervous parent taking their child to university or boarding school. How would my mother get on? Would she make friends? Would she wish that she'd stayed in Teddington? These questions had haunted me for the last few months.

Walking towards the lift, we heard a loud voice behind us: "Now, who's this trying to sneak past me without saying hello?" It was the house manager. We barely knew her, but she threw her arms around my mother as if she was a long-lost relative. It was a good start, but I was still anxious to see my mother's reaction to the flat.

I opened the door and let my mother go in first:

"Ooh, what a lovely carpet...cor, you've been busy...oh I like this...and you can see the hills...and the curtains aren't too bad...I might keep them...this is lovely, really lovely."

As we stood by the window, looking at the sheep grazing on the Downs, my phone rang:

"Hello, this is Peter...no, we're still in Teddington. The thing is, I did as you suggested and took the door off the latch and shut it behind me, but then I remembered that I'd left my briefcase in the kitchen and I really need it.What should I do?"

Several responses sprang to mind.

Peter and son eventually arrived three hours late. I decided to help them rather than waste another two hours and by 6.00, it was all over. At the end Peter was charm itself, wishing my mother a happy time in Lewes, recommending local places for a good lunch. We said goodbye and I comforted myself with the knowledge that I would never require Peter's services again.

One week on, I have been amazed by the ease with which my mother has adapted to her new circumstances. She seems genuinely happy in a way that I never dared to imagine was possible and I hope that without the burden of trying to manage a cold, damp house in a street with no shops, my mother still has at least another decade ahead of her.

The last few weeks have been exhausting, but they have also been a welcome distraction from the main thing that is going on in my life at the moment. Three weeks ago, my oldest son was diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder (it's complicated, so I'll avoid labels for the moment).

On the one hand, this news is heartbreaking, but on the other it comes as a relief after five very difficult years that culminated in us having to take our son out of school. We now know why he has found ordinary life so difficult and, more importantly, we will now be able to get him the help he needs.

It's a great pity that some of the psychologists at CAMHS didn't recognise my son's condition earlier, as he could have been spared a lot of pain and distress. Instead, we were accused of trying to 'medicalise' our son and the spotlight was turned on our parenting skills. If we had seen a psychiatrist (as opposed to a psychologist) at the beginning, our lives might have followed a very different course.

I have avoided writing about this subject for a long time because I'm aware that the appeal of this blog, for many, is the things I come across in my job: the strange book covers, old photographs and Derek's diaries. But since my son's diagnosis, I have found it increasingly difficult to write the usual, mildly amusing blog posts whilst my life is undergoing what feels like a huge, techtonic shift.

I apologise for the self-indulgent nature of this post, but it has been cathartic. I will return to the Victorian photos, politically incorrect book covers and strange ephemera soon, but for the moment, this is what I needed to write.

Moving

2011-07-06T12:49:00.014Z

Most of us have items of clothing that we only wear indoors. I have an Andrew Marr t-shirt which always cheers me up, but I wouldn't wear it in public. I'm always suspicious of people who sport attention-seeking 'comedy' t-shirts.

I also have old Waterstone's t-shirts that I use for doing the decorating. One of them is a very unflattering bright red XL top that says "Can I help you find the perfect present?". We had to wear them one Christmas - the idea was that they would make the staff easy to identify and seem more approachable.

I wasn't convinced. When I go into shops, I identify staff as the people standing behind the till or the ones who aren't wearing coats.

And since when did retail companies have the right to regard their staff as advertising space?

The t-shirts were very annoying. When I popped out to buy sandwiches at M&S, I'd forget I had the t-shirt on and wonder why strangers kept accosting me with questions about books.

Yesterday, I had to paint a flat and found an old t-shirt that said "Ask me about the Waterstone's card". After putting on the first coat of emulsion, I drove home and popped into the corner shop to buy some wine. Raj, the owner, looked at my chest and said "Just back from work then?"

Outside the shop, a neighbour looked me up and down and said "You're early today". I suddenly realised that, as far as my neighbours were concerned, I still work at Waterstone's. Perhaps I should talk to people more.

I had been decorating the flat for my mother. On Friday, she will leave the Teddington house that she has lived in for 48 years and move into a block of sheltered accommodation flats for the elderly, less than a mile from where I live. It will be a huge wrench, I know, but at 81 my mother is finding living alone in a three-bedroom house increasingly hard.

I've been trying to persuade her to sell the house for years. Aside from the fact that it has no central heating and needs a huge amount of work done, my mother's house is also too far from the shops or local doctor, so every outing requires a bus journey. Until recently this wasn't a problem, but a near-brush with death last October made my mother realise how vulnerable she is.

On Sunday I went to say goodbye to the house that I called home for more than half of my life.

It is part of a long road of Victorian, semi-detached redbrick houses, in a sleepy, dull London suburb that is now incredibly popular with house buyers. Teddington may not be very exciting, but the combination of the River Thames, a wealth of parks and some good transport links to central London have made it desirable for those people who find other parts of the metropolis a little too 'urban'.

In spite of the popularity of Teddington, I thought that my mother would struggle to sell the house, as in 1981 my parents decided to rip out the period sash windows and pebbledash the walls (I think I once pompously accused them of "architectural vandalism"). To my surprise, she found a buyer within 10 days. If ever anyone needed proof that selling houses was all about location, here was a prime example.

My mother has left her electric fire for the new owners, as she won't need it in her flat. I had to bite my tongue. I know that the new owners will completely gut the house, extend it and add period touches that were probably never there in the first place. They certainly won't want a naff electric fire.

Somehow I don't think they'll want this carpet either:

My parents bought it in 1963. The carpet is still in good condition after nearly half a century. Apparently the firm that made it went into receivership, as their products were too well made and retailers didn't want to sell carpets that never wore out. The top left-hand corner used to be covered by a rug.

During my final visit I decided to take photos of mundane objects, like the carpet, that hadn't changed since I was a child. The items included a barometer that never worked, some candlelabra light fittings, two 1970s lampshades and this clock, which chimes every quarter of an hour:

When I was sent away to a sanitorium as a child, I was only allowed to see my parents once a month, so telephone calls were very important. I remember the almost unbearable feeling of homesickness that swept over me when I heard this clock chime in the background.

(Later, I became less fond of the clock. When I brought girlfriends home after the pubs had closed, I realised what a passion killer the Westminster chimes were).

After taking the photos, we had our last lunch in the house: fillet steak with new potatoes and peas. As a special concession to my middle-class sensibilities, my mother didn't call it dinner and only boiled the peas for three minutes instead of the usual ten. Otherwise, everything was the same as it had always been: the table, the chairs and the cutlery, which had been bought with petrol-station coupons some time in the 1970s.

In two days time it would all be gone.

There was one thing left to do. My mother picked up her stick and put her other arm in mine. Together, we slowly walked to the local cemetery where my father is buried. "I don't think he's really here" my mother said, meaning "This might be the last time I visit my husband's grave".

We stood in front of the grave and I suppose it should have been a very emotional moment, but in the distance someone was holding an outdoor event and all we could hear was a man delivering a very bad performance of David Bowie's 'Rebel Rebel'.

I looked at the words on the gravestone: "He was a good man and did good things" - inspired by the final sentence of 'The Woodlanders'. I hope that Dad would have approved.

I have finished painting the flat, but tomorrow is going to be a day of flatpack hell, where I will have to work out whether Part A is the short screw or the slightly longer one, followed by the realisation that Part C is in fact Part E. I'm dreading it.

But hopefully, when my mother walks through the door on Friday afternoon and sees a warm, welcoming, comfortable home, she will feel relief rather than regret.

The Avengers - German Style

2011-07-01T19:06:00.002Z

Sorry ZDF, but it doesn't quite work...

How I Would Save Waterstone's*

2011-06-29T13:53:00.010Z

Last week the shareholders of HMV reached an almost unanimous decision to approve the sale of its Waterstone’s bookshop chain to the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. Today, the business officially changed hands and bookseller James Daunt took over as MD.

This is great news for everyone in the publishing industry, not to mention readers who value specialist booksellers with large stockholdings.

Alexander Mamut

Also, on a personal note, as it is almost five years to the day since the bookshop chain I worked for was bought by HMV, it has been hard not to to feel a certain schadenfreude at the demise of those people who thought that bookselling was no different from any other area of retail. I hope that there will be no need for the word ‘product’ in James Daunt’s Waterstone’s.

But before we put out the flags, a word of caution. HMV may have mismanaged Waterstone's for over a decade, but can a change ot ownership make that much of a difference in a market that appears to be undergoing an irreversible transformation?

However good Alexander Mamut and James Daunt are, they still might fail.

Before we look at the uphill struggle that faces James Daunt, lets focus on the positives:

In spite of Amazon and the supermarkets, Waterstone’s is still a profitable business
In 2010, its market share was just under 30% of total book sales
It frequently achieves high scores in customer satisfaction surveys
It is the only large specialist bookshop chain in Britain
Publishers want Waterstone's to survive

Indeed, when you a visit a branch in December and see the queues, it's hard to understand how the chain almost ended up in the hands of an asset stripper.

But the reality is that Waterstone's is dying, albeit very slowly. The sales have been slowly shrinking for over five years and many shops are now making a loss, including the 'flagship' Piccadilly store. Several years of negative growth have produced an entrenched mentality in the senior management and rather than trying to increase sales (or 'grow' sales, as they now say), the emphasis is on reducing costs: the beginning of the end.**

The main management failures of Waterstone's are as follows:

They failed to establish an strong internet presence in the mid-90s and after a half-hearted attempt, let Amazon fulfill its online orders until 2006 - a move that rivals Decca's decision not to sign the Beatles
They became obsessed with wooing the mass market at the expense of their traditional market of 'heavy book buyers'
They recruited too many middle managers from other areas of retail, who knew nothing about books and came from businesses that valued compliance and uniformity over creativity and passion, resulting in a chain of bland, unexciting bookshops
The whole business was dominated by a counter-intuitive stock control system that looked and felt like a second rate MS-DOS program from 1989
They reacted to changes in the book trade, rather than anticipating them

In short, there are a lot of things wrong with Waterstone's and even if James Daunt can fix some of them, will anyone notice?

One of the most salutary (I know this word has been out of fashion since the 1870s, but I like it) lessons I learned in the book trade was when Waterstone's took over Ottakar's, rebranding every shop in the chain. For me, it was a cataclysmic event. For my customers, it was just another day. Very few of them even noticed the huge new black sign over the door.

Getting the book buying public excited about Waterstone's again will be a huge challenge.

To make things worse, the high street is going into meltdown. Long established brands like Mothercare, Habitat, Thorntons and TJ Hughes are either going into administration or slashing the number of stores, as customers increasingly migrate to the internet.

It's not a good time to work in high street retailing.

In an ideal world, James Daunt would have a few months to get his head around the business before coming up with a plan to save the chain. Unfortunately, time is a luxury James Daunt doesn't have. The crucial Christmas promotions will have to be signed off almost immediately.

On the one hand I don't envy James Daunt, but on the other, this is a fantastic opportunity. The death of Waterstone's needn't be inevitable. Other chains have suprised their detractors by reversing their fortunes and it's possible that James Daunt and Alexander Mamut may go down in posterity as the men who saved Britain's last bookshop chain.

But how?

If I was sitting in James Daunt's chair next Monday, these would be my priorities:

1. Increase the stockholding.

There was a time when you could go into most branches of Waterstone's and expect to find all of the backlist of authors like Ian McEwan or William Boyd. Not any more. Without a decent range, Waterstone's is finished. Of course, keeping a large range of slow-moving backlist titles is expensive, but if publishers are really serious about supporting Waterstone's, they should provide the stock under more favourable terms. Surely it's in the publishers' interest to have their books in shops rather than in a warehouse?

If customers can once again feel confident that they can find the book they want today (at a competitive price), they'll be less likely to automatically default to Amazon.

2. End the blandness.

Whether you're looking at the homepage of www.waterstones.com or gazing at a shop window, the overall impression is one of blandness. Dull, safe posters with insipid, dumbed-down bylines and predictable 3 for 2 promotions that have the same titles in month after month - that's the modern Waterstone's. In Ottakar's, shops competed with each other to come up with the quirkiest, most eye-catching windows. In Waterstone's, compliance has been valued over creativity.

Waterstone's branches need to make their shops as exciting as the books: eccentric, unpredictable, magical places, buzzing with energy, otherwise what's the point of going there?

As for the website, it should be a bibliophile's paradise, with videos of author interviews, YouTube clips of signing sessions and a vast archive of author information. At Ottakar's I was on the editorial committee of an award-winning fiction microsite and we produced hundreds of author biographies. I presume that Waterstone's now own that data, so why isn't it being used on their website?

3. Embrace the e-book.

As with the internet, Waterstone's made a half-hearted attempt at competing with Amazon and squandered a vital opportunity to get on the digital bandwagon. The game isn't over yet. Thousands of backlist titles have yet to be digitised and if Waterstone's can come up with a genuinely competitive alternative to the Kindle, they may be able to stop their shops becoming showrooms for Amazon.

4. Put staff morale at the top of the agenda.

The working culture in Waterstone's has been awful. An obsession with compliance has produced a climate of fear, where disciplinary action is routinely used as a motivational tool. When shops are earmarked for closure, staff often find out from the trade press before they receive any communication from the senior management.

The key to Waterstone's recovery is the enthusiasm and passion of its booksellers. But it will be hard to improve staff morale if the store managers are stuck in the back office for most of the day, completing one spreadsheet and after another. The excessive bureacracy should be trimmed down so that managers can spend more time selling books.

Staff morale in James Daunt's own chain is good, by all accounts. I hope that he can persuade some of the more abrasive characters in Waterstone's middle management to change their approach.

5. Give power back to the shops.

When I worked on a few projects for Ottakar's head office, I had access to the company's sales data and used to love analysing the sales performance of particular titles in different shops. Why did book X sell 57 copies in one shop, but only 4 in another, when both stores had a similar turnover? Sometimes it was because one shop had sold out, but more often than not it was because the local market was very different.

There has been a lot of talk in Waterstone's about responding to the local market, but when I walk in the front door, all I see is a bland, one-size-fits all approach. Each shop should have a unique offering that reflects the passion and knowledge of its staff, along with a strong awareness of the local customers.

6. Ditch the new Waterstone's logo:

Alright, number six isn't essential (I know some people even prefer the new drooping breasts logo to the traditional, angular W). The main thing is shops with more books, and a range and pricing that reflects the local market.

I could go on. I haven't even touched on the thorny issue of closing unprofitable shops, fixing or scrapping the central distribution hub, introducing a half-decent EPOS system or paying people more money. But that's enough to be going on with.

You may completely disagree with me (indeed I hope some people do, as I like a good debate). Perhaps Waterstone's would be even worse off today if it hadn't been run on strict retail lines. I don't know. All I can say is that as an Amazon customer, the main thing that would get me back into Waterstone's is a quirky, exciting range. However good Amazon is, you can't beat real browsing.

I wish Alexander Mamut and James Daunt the best of luck (and God knows, they'll need it). If they can bring Waterstone's back from the brink of extinction, to the point where it is a viable business with a future, both readers and publishers will owe them a huge debt.

* The title should really be 'How I Would Go About Saving Waterstone's' (I wouldn't be arrogant enough to assume that I have the answers), but I went for the punchier option.

** Since writing this post, it has been announced that during its year under Dominic Myers, Waterstone's increased its profit by £6.7 million. This is a great achievement, but doesn't alter the fact that unless the business reverses the decline in sales (last year's were nearly 4% down on the previous year), its days are numbered.

The Enigma Variations

2011-06-25T08:50:00.005Z

I found this photo at work yesterday and almost threw it away, but there was something intriguing about the scene. Who was the mysterious figure in the centre who had drawn such a large crowd?

The image was of a fairly poor quality, but I hoped that a high resolution scan might resolve the enigma.

I scanned the image at 1200 dpi, which is more than adequate for most old photographs, and let Photoshop work its magic, enlarging different sections.

Here are the results:

This is the full photo after the colour balance and contrast have been improved (apologies to all fans of sepia). There is a greater clarity, but the figure in the centre remains tantalisingly elusive.

Now everything becomes much clearer, apart from the blurred figures of the men at the front. Is that who I think it is?

A further zoom has expanded the crest above the woman's head to a resolution where some of the writing is legible.

It is, of course, the Royal Coat of Arms, with its motto Dieu Et Mon Droit. I can only assume that it is Queen Victoria who has drawn such a large crowd on a rainy day.

I have no idea where or when this picture was taken. Queen Victoria is wearing black and given that she went into a prolonged period of mourning after Prince Albert's death, this must be the late 1860s, at the very earliest.

Perhaps someone who knows about fashion will be able to determine which decade this photograph was taken in. I would certainly like to know about the significance of these hats:

Scanned at 1200 dpi, the enlarged sections look like a monochrome, pointilist crowdscape by Seurat. Most of the people have their backs turned to us and the few faces we can see are blank and expressionless.

All apart from one - the woman on Queen Victoria's right. She appears to be looking down, in deference to the Queen.

Of course I may be completely on the wrong track. Someone might recognise the enigmatic figure as 'Big Bertha' McMahon, the famous Victorian female heavyweight wrestler, or Dame Cynthia Partington-Ffoulkes, whose Temperance League speeches terrified pub landlords from Portsmouth to Perth.

It could even be an author signing session, perhaps by Mrs Henry Wood, if they did things like that in the nineteenth century.

However, I'm fairly confident that I've discovered a photograph of Queen Victoria.

If anyone has any observations or insights about the time and the place, I'd be very grateful. I would love to know more about this mysterious image.

The Mouse That Roared

2011-06-22T11:42:00.001Z

I have to admit that my knowledge of the British Raj in India is probably limited to a single viewing of Richard Attenborough's 'Ghandi' and the first episode of the television series 'The Jewel in the Crown' (I can't remember why I didn't watch the whole series).

Also, last year, I listened to a radio programme about the Indian Mutiny.

This seriously compromises my ability to add pithy, relevant comments to the following photographs, which come from an album featuring a group of British soldiers in India during the years 1917-19. I tried to gen-up on Wikipedia, but it had one of the longest entries I've ever come across.

So here are the photos, minus any pertinent, erudite observations. I may even have to resort to making fun of people's pith helmets and absurd moustaches:

How did a relatively small army of overgrown boy scouts, from a damp little island in northern Europe, manage to successfully govern a vast, densely populated subcontinent in Asia? Several modern commentators have suggested that when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have done with learning a few lessons in statecraft from the Raj.

He looks like a serious sort of chap, but the short trousers don't really convey the right sense of gravitas. It must have been unbearably hot and humid for the British Army to go these lengths (or lack of).

"See that beautiful bird up there? Ten bob says I can bring it down within two shots..."

"Bingo! I'll get the kitchen wallahs to serve it for dinner."

"Sir, we have run out of fuel in the kitchens. We will call the Coal Wallah..."

One of the greatest (and least controversial) legacies of British rule in India was the rail network.

Rather disturbingly, it looks as if the small boy has some sort of chain around its neck

A rare shot of 'our boys' in long trousers

These were a highly-disciplined body of men, ready to quash any insurrection at a moment's notice, even in their underwear

But beyond their proud military bearing, these soldiers had a more sensitive side

You can insert your own caption here

Sadly, although the album has details of dates and locations, there are no names, otherwise I'd try and locate a living relative of these men (hopefully not the person who threw it out a few weeks ago). Since I launched my project at work, I've only had one success story - this handwritten novel was reunited with the author's relatives, to their delight.

But this album will now join the others, gathering dust in a corner of my office. I know I'll never throw it away.

French Leave

2011-06-20T13:42:00.003Z

I have just returned from a very wet week in Normandy, during which I was assaulted by goats and mocked by the French for my appalling grasp of their language. In both cases it was my own fault. I went into each situation with a lot of goodwill, but a lamentable absence of foresight.

On the plus side, it was a learning curve. I will never again make the mistake of walking into the middle of a herd of goats with an open bag of food, and as far as speaking French goes, I must try harder.

I had made the mistake of thinking that my recent Livemocha French course would be enough to get me through everday situations. Every time I completed an online exercise, an encouraging email would arrive within seconds saying "Great job!"

In hindsight, the positive feedback probably gave me a slightly inflated view of my abilities. When, on the first day, I confidently asked a supermarket cashier for a plastic bag, I was completely foxed by her reply:

"Souhaitezvousuneboîtepourlesbouteillesdevin?"

As the week went on, I became increasingly adept at saying "Je ne comprends pas".

I clearly need to learn some more French, but at times I'm tempted to go back to the tried and trusted method of smiling, shouting and pointing.

But it wasn't all humiliation and goats; there were magical moments too. One day I went for a drive with my mother-in-law and we ended up in a beautiful forest, near the town of Saint-Sever-Calvados:

After several miles of driving through dense woodland along empty roads, we saw a sign pointed to 'L'Hermitage'. It sounded intriguing, so I turned off and followed a rough track until we reached a group of large, granite stone buildings. A sign announced that were at a convent, which was strictly privée, but visitors were welcome to visit the chapel.

I parked the car and we got out. It was completely silent, apart from sound of birdsong and the wind roaring through the branches of the trees. A perfect place for the contemplative life.

As we walked down a dark, wooded lane to the chapel, an elderly Frenchman seemed to appear from nowhere and started talking to us. By now I was used to saying "Je ne comprends pas" and expected a characteritic shrug of resignation, but instead we received a reply in perfect, slightly aristocratic English.

When we complimented the man on his English, he explained that he'd taught the subject in Caen for over 20 years:

"I still live in Caen, but every year I come here for a retreat for a few days, to enjoy the silence. Would you like me to show you around the chapel?"

The chapel was beautiful, with an austerity that reminded me of a 6th century church that I'd visited last year. It belonged to this order of nuns and although a sign asked vistors not to disturb the residents, I was a little confused to learn that they had a gift shop that sold greetings cards, books and CDs.

After the well-spoken stranger had finished giving a tour of the chapel, he invited us into the convent for a cup of tea. He confessed that as much as he loved the contemplative life, he was quite relieved when strangers turned up.

We were led to a simply-furnished room with bare stone walls and served tea and brioche, accompanied by some gorgeous jam that had been made by the nuns.

After exchanging a few pleasantries, we asked the man about his life. He was called Father Yves and belonged to a religious order called the Salesians, who are known for their work in educating underprivilged children. He had been associated with the order since he was a child.

Born in Paris, Yves' father died shortly before the War and his mother, unable to cope with raising four children on her own, sent him to an orphange in Normandy. It sounded like the beginning of a tragic story, but Father Yves was quick to dismiss any suggestions that he'd had a tough childhood:

"No, no! It was a very good orphanage. I had a much better life being there than I would have done otherwise."

We went on to talk about the persecution of the Catholic church after the Revolution and I mentioned how much French history I'd learned from reading novels. My mother-in-law agreed, saying how much she loved Zola. There was a slightly awkward silence (somehow I don't think that Father Yves was a Zola fan) before he asked if we'd read Stevenson's 'Travels With a Donkey'. When we shook our heads, he seemed shocked:

"It is a wonderful book and I have done the same journey myself three times. But without the donkey."

Later, as we walked back to the car, my mother-in-law and I agreed that it had been worth coming to Normandy just to meet Father Yves. Anything else was a bonus.

Sadly, the rest of the week was spent dodging showery squalls and our suntan lotions and beachwear never saw the light of day. However, in between downpours we did manage to go on a few excursions.

Here are a few of my favourite moments:

1. A trip to Dinan:

I wanted to visit Brittany and the town of Dinan, with its largely unspoilt medieval centre, is well worth a visit. However, I wish that the owners of the house below hadn't filled their hanging baskets with plastic flowers. Très vulgaire!

2. Encounters with lemurs:

During a brief spell of sunshine, we visited a superb zoo that had recreated a Madagascan forest environment - minus any logging companies - where lemurs could wander freely. Most of the time, they seemed to be content to laze on the grass and lick their genitals, but occasionally they liked to investigate the visitors and seemed happy to pose for photographs.

3. Sandstone saint

At a church in Granville, this sandstone figure of a saint has become so weathered that it now looks like an abstract contemporary sculpture. I'm not sure if this picture will appeal to anyone else, but I liked it.

4. A typically French solution to a rattling window shutter:

5. Frog Prison:

By sheer coincidence our next door neighbour was also in Normandy last week, staying at her parents' house, so we drove over to have lunch with her. Although we had a lovely time, it was a small house and my sons soon started to get restless, so our neighbour asked them if they'd like to see something unusual.

She led the boys out into the small backyard, turned a hose tap on and started firing a jet of water at a small drain, that was covered with a metal grill.

Suddenly, a frog appeared, holding onto the bars like a prisoner looking through a cell window:

Apparently the frog lives in the drain. How he got there and the question of whether he has a secret exit or not is unknown, but he clearly has enough to eat. Our neighbour said that he'd been there for years, but I didn't think frogs lived that long. Is he the same frog, trapped in solitary confinement for years, or one of a family of subterranean amphibians?

6. French supermarkets:

French supermarkets are wonderful. Anywhere where you can buy a decent bottle of wine for £3 and choose from a huge selection of cheeses can't be bad, but I was particularly interested in the books. For all their supposed cultural chauvinism, the French had a far wider selection of Anglophone authors in translation than I expected.

I was particularly intrigued to find a number of English-sounding names that I'd never heard of. Were these authors who'd found more success abroad than they had in their own countries, or were they American authors who'd never been published in Britain?

When I worked at Waterstone's in Richmond, I was often asked by German customers for novels by Noah Gordon. The first time I was asked for a copy of Gordon's novel 'The Physician', I confessed that I'd never heard of him. The German customer exploded: "But he is a bestselling English author in Germany! You MUST have his books!"

After a quick check on the microfiche, I explained to the woman that there were no Noah Gordon novels in print in Britain and asked if he was, by any chance, American? "Yes, he is American, but if he is a bestseller in America and Germany, why not Britain?"

It was a question I couldn't answer. For whatever reason, some American authors fail to take off in Britain and vice versa - I'm told that Lisa Scottoline is a perefctly good crime writer, but in spite of several marketing campaigns and jacket redesigns, her novels have never become popular on this side of the Atlantic. A similar attempt was made with Noah Gordon. Perhaps he's better in translation.

Browsing through the large selection of French novels (a far wider selection than any British supermarket would stock), I was frustrated to see so many intriguing-looking titles that would probably never be translated into English.

That, of course, is another reason for learning French. I may never become a fluent speaker and will continue to be baffled by a language that sounds like a non-stop succession of vowels and soft consonants, but if I could read books in French, that alone would make it worthwhile.

More Victorians

2011-06-10T11:25:00.001Z

Yesterday another Victorian photograph album appeared on my desk at work, rescued by someone in the warehouse. Sadly, it wasn't as fascinating as this album, which I found last year, but there were a few portraits which I thought were worth sharing:

I'm not quite sure why this photograph of a Spike Milligan lookalike and his wife was taken at such a jaunty angle.

The boy's face is slightly blurred because he didn't remain still, but the dog was clearly an experienced sitter.

A wonderful, strong face

The husband in this couple from Oban looks like a formidable character

The one intriguing thing about this album is the variety of locations that these photographs were taken in: Cardiff, London, Oban, Birmingham, Aberdeen and Leamington Spa - if this is a family album, they were clearly a product of the huge migration that took place during the early Victorian age, when people left their largely rural homes in search of work.

When he retired, my father traced our family tree and got back as far as the 1740s. The death certificates showed that when they lived in the rural Kentish village that had been their home for generations, my ancestors lived to a ripe old age. Then one of them moved to London and became a cab driver.

Both he and his son died in their early 50s.

The Problem of Evil

2011-06-08T13:20:00.012Z

One of the strangest publications I've come across recently is a 1939 pamphlet called 'Tom, Dick and Harry', produced by the Mansfield House University Settlement - not a name I was familiar with.

A quick search a Google produced this result:

"The Mansfield House University Settlement was founded in 1889 and was intended to give students of Mansfield College Oxford first hand experience of living and working with working-class people. The Settlement wanted to bring ‘culture’ to the people of the East End, and to provide people with opportunities for leisure, recreation and self-improvement. (The idea was partly to encourage people to take up respectable pursuits, rather than spend all their time and money in the public house.)"

So far so good: a group of well-intentioned Oxford undergraduates helping the poor.

As for the pamphlet, its main purpose seemed to be to raise money for the boys clubs that the Settlement had established in the East End. Once again, a laudible cause.

But when I saw the subtitle 'A Calendar of Good and Evil', my alarm bells started to ring. For example, the young man below may be a bit of a ruffian, but is evil really the right word?

Apparently this is what he should be doing:

Quite right too. A bracing 12-mile ride to find the nearest stretch of countryside will do this young man a world of good. Away from the temptations of the city, he will discover new pleasures: medieval churches, brass rubbing, butterfly collecting and bird spotting.

The whole pamphlet consists of pairs of contrasting photographs: one showing a youth being 'good' at a boys' club; the other depicting 'evil' in the streets:

These two tearaways are behaving like savages, not subjects of His Majesty King George VI. The Marquess of Queensbury would be turning in his grave.

Luckily, the Boys' Club provides Cockney lads with a more constructive outlet for their innate cunning and pent-up aggression:

"This is good, and I say, isn't that WH Auden in the background? Apparently nobody turned up to the poetry class. Philistines!"

In addition to promoting physical health, the Mansfield House Settlement was also concerned about the mental and spiritual well-being of their boys - a young man should not be filling his head with lurid tales of murder and adultery (at least he's reading a newspaper!):

Instead, he should be in the library, brushing up his Latin and memorising Ozymandias for the Christmas concert:

But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Supposing our lads become susceptible to the lure of political extremism:

"We have happily no need in this country to beat the big drum; nor to regiment youth into a hectic nationalism; the right spirit is there and only needs to be fostered to grow unconsciously and naturally."

Given that the year is 1939 and this is the East End of London, where Blackshirts and Communists had fought fierce battles in the streets, the words of this pamphlet are rather pointed.

As for the 'right spirit' that needs to be fostered, this photo is given as an illustration:

Here, our young wastrels are enjoying a four-part arrangement of 'Linden Lea', with the inspiring figure of Lord Nelson in the background. No nationalism here - that's too foreign.

But these boys cannot exist purely on a diet of Shelley, Vaughan Williams and vigorous exercise. During the interludes between world wars, they need to be gainfully employed:

The alternative, as 'Tom, Dick and Harry' subtly points out, is this:

"Not so fast now, you young good-for-nothing!"

But if one of the members of the Boys' Club does revert to his dissolute ways of old, he can be certain that his former partners in crime will hunt him down like a dog, until he is bought to justice:

I wonder what happened to the boys' clubs fundraising drive? Was it quickly eclipsed by the advent of war, or did the Mansfield House University Settlement come into its own during the Blitz? It has been difficult to find out, although this website gives a brief history of the charity up to the year 2000.

From a modern perspective, the 'Tom, Dick and Harry' pamphlet seems absurd. We shy away from using the word evil these days and I think that there are times when we shouldn't be afraid to use it, but if we apply it to feckless teenage boys, then what word do we have left for people like Ratko Mladic?

As for the idea of privileged university graduates trying to bring 'culture' to the East End, it might seem ridiculous - who would dare to do that today? But if the alternative is doing nothing, condemning people to live their whole lives without having a choice, I'd rather have some naive, well-intentioned undergraduate patronise me with high art and adult education classes.

My grandfather was a Cockney and fought in the First World War. He never had a chance to learn a trade before the War and when he returned, opprtunities were limited. He spent his entire working life in a succession of badly paid jobs as an 'unskilled labourer'.

My father seemed destined to follow the same path, leaving school at the age of 14 to work in a factory. But things had changed. A spell of National Service in the RAF at the end of the Second World War seemed to open new horizons and my father wasn't willing to meekly return to his old life. Instead, he went to night school and prepared for the Civil Service Entrance Exam which, in many ways, was an IQ test. He passed.

My father never became truly middle class, but he was a world away from his father's life, with its limited choices and low expectations.

By the time I was an 'A' Level student, in the 1980s, it felt as if class and background were completely irrelevant. But at university I learned how wrong I was.

The people at the Mansfield House University Settlement knew that lives were limited by social background and we should salute them for their efforts, even if their attempts at fundraising were a little overzealous!

The Nature Cure

2011-06-05T16:21:00.009Z

Several news items caught my eye this week, from VS Naipul's absurd rant about the inferiority of women writers, to the surprising revelation that there is a sub-genre of porn films based on Star Trek:

An impressive attention to detail, but those badges don't look quite right

However, the story that interested me most concerned the publication of a new independent report about the financial value of nature. According to the 'UK National Ecosystem Assessment', nature is worth £50 billion and the health benefit of living close to a green landscape is £300 per person per year.

Of course, that's putting it very crudely. This report is a complex survey that involved hundreds of scientists, but newspapers need headlines and 'Nature worth £50billion to Britain's economy' has to compete with the latest update on Ryan Giggs' love life.

I thought about this report yesterday, when I took my sons to the Lewes Railway Land project - a nature reserve created out of waste ground that used to be railway sidings. Twenty years ago, there was talk of turning the land into a retail park, with space for several hundred cars. In Crawley they would have had the JVCs out before the ink was dry on the contract, but in Lewes it was a different story.

Here's what could have been the 873rd branch of Sainbury's:

Hopefully there will be fewer retail parks in the future and more places like this.

The other benefit of going to the Railway Land is that it was completely free. My sons spent a couple of hours having far more fun than they would have done manically charging around a softplay centre, bouncing off the walls.

As we left I congratulated myself for not spending any money. But then I went and completely blew it by visiting the Lewes farmers' market.

That was a big mistake:

Lost and Found

2011-05-31T16:45:00.010Z

I didn't set out to create a theme to this post, but today's book jackets have conveniently fallen into two distinct categories: Schoolboy Mayhem and Ladies in Africa (and I use the word 'ladies' deliberately).

First, if you thought that the British public school was the epitome of order and self-discipline, think again:

After pausing for a second to straighten his tie, Polson quickly lashes out at the new boy who has committed the double sin of being ginger and failing to leave the bottom button of his waistcoat undone, much to the amusement of a young Kenneth Williams at the far right. It's a jungle out there.

(NB - Richard at Grey Area has pointed out that this may actually be an early version of Gilbert and George's Bend It)

Things go from bad to worse at Prior's, the 14th best public school in Herefordshire. Here you can see the 17th Viscount Melrose administering a sound thrashing to a ghastly scholarship boy who keeps talking about the poetry and the 'brotherhood of man'.

Legend has it that the game of Rugby was born in 1823, when William Webb Ellis "with fine disregard for the game of football" picked up the ball and starting running with it. It was the beginning of a noble tradition.

The boys at Moorhaven School tried a similar thing in 1872, when Aubrey Gosling picked up a dead monkey and ran from the tuck shop to the cricket pavilion in under two minutes. The 'Monkey Run' quickly became a school tradition, but it never caught on.

With this book, there seems to be a slight dissonance between the sci-fi title and the image of a schoolboy being chased across a field. I can only presume that the bull isn't under alien control, so what's going on? Is that a deadly alien weapon they're holding?

This book isn't nearly as exciting as it sounds.

What interests me is how children's book covers have become far more 'touchy-feely" in recent years, whilst many of the stories have become darker.

This photograph was found in one of the books. At first it looks quite incongruous, but closer scrutiny reveals how pissed off everyone is.

The final three jackets all fall into the 'Ladies in Africa' category:

Moving to Africa, this cover seem to suggest dark passions ignited by the lure of the Casbah, although the dustjacket blurb clearly states that she falls in love with a man called Julian. I don't think that's a Moroccan name.

The rather convoluted dustjacket blurb reads:

"When Pudge Barton went on safari in Kenya with her friend Beryl and Beryl's father, Commissioner Newton, with whom she was staying for the summer holidays, she little knew what lay ahead..."

I've no idea what this novel's about, but I'd like to think that it is a sequel to 'Strange Safari':

"Jilted at the altar, when her fiance Rodney runs off with a 14-year-old Masai girl, Beryl Newton flees to Zanzibar, where she amuses herself by holding drinking competitions with foreign journalists. A life of alcoholism and penury beckons, but Beryl's fortunes suddenly change when her long-lost friend Pudge walks into the bar, accompanied by a woman smoking a pipe."

I feel as if I'm trawling through a golden age of book jacket design, between the plain, utilitarian covers from before the First World War, to the knowing, postmodern images of our time.

I can't imagine anyone laughing at the cover of the 'Da Vinci Code' in 50 years time. But all is not lost. We can still content ourselves with the absurd text.

A Musical Interlude

2011-05-28T13:42:00.002Z

During a rather morbid phase in my childhood, I went around recording the voices of relatives that I thought were about die.

I found the cassette recently and listened to the recordings, expecting to find some gems. Sadly, all they did was recapture the sheer tedium of being an only child, surrounded by old people - the passage of time hadn't made my Uncle Jack's allotment anecdotes any more riveting.

But there was one exception: my great-uncle, John Brown. Always immaculately dressed, with an aristocratic mien that belied his humble origins, he was more than happy to perform for the microphone. Here is the result:

Crawley (Another Dull Post About Bookselling)

2011-05-26T17:47:00.015Z

Only two weeks ago I was writing about the fate of Waterstone's - the largest bookshop chain outside the USA.

The story of Waterstone's is a sad one. Once, it was the pre-eminent specialist bookseller in Britain, synonymous with range and authority. For a generation who had grown up with a stark choice between a poorly stocked independent bookseller and a branch of W H Smith, Waterstone's was a revelation.

Publishers loved Waterstone's too. Suddenly, they could sell all of their difficult backlist and midlist titles to the most obscure corners of Middle England. Sales reps, armed with suitcases full of stock catalogues, descended like vultures, eager to take advantage of the bright, but often clueless, young booksellers, who were usually straight out of university.

I was one of them. When John Calder - Samuel Beckett's publisher - arrived unannounced and proceeded to order a vast quantity of backlist titles that we'd never sell, it didn't occur to me to dare to challenge his recommendations.

But it wasn't just John Calder's books that clogged up the shelves . The weakness of the original Waterstone's was that we thought that range was everything and stocked a lot of authors whose books no longer sold. Returns were done sporadically and, over the years, the shelves became clogged with dead stock (I once returned to my old branch of Waterstone's, five years after leaving and was dismayed to find stock that I'd ordered still sitting on the shelves).

However, when HMV bought the company, they went too far in the opposite direction.

One of the great strengths of the old Waterstone's was that if you liked the new Justin Cartwright novel, you could feel fairly confident that there'd be several of his backlist titles on the shelf. But not any more. HMV stripped away everything that was good about Waterstone's until it became the bland retail chain that it is today. Admittedly the competition was much tougher after the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, but, without a decent range, what was the point of Waterstone's?

Only a few weeks ago, Waterstone's looked as if it was finished, but luckily HMV were forced to sell the chain and it now has a whole new lease of life as a privately owned company.

In my last post, I cited Daunt Books as an example of how booksellers can survive and I'm heartened to see that the new owner has appointed James Daunt as Managing Director.

But, as several people have commented, although Daunt Books has bucked the trend of declining high-street book sales, isn't that simply because James Daunt has been astute enough to open shops in the wealthiest parts of London? How will he apply his formula to a national chain with stores in a variety of locations?

I have some experience in this area. Eleven years ago I became the manager of a loss-making branch of Ottakar's in Crawley - a 'new town' near Gatwick Airport. The shop wouldn't have been my first choice, but I wanted to buy a house in Lewes and Crawley was the nearest branch of the chain. Also, with a newborn son, I was struggling to manage my frantically busy London store. It was time to downsize.

I had mixed feelings about moving to Crawley, particularly the commuting. First, I had to drive for 23 miles along this road:

Then, as I reached the outskirts of Crawley, the traffic suddenly slowed down and the remaining part of my journey was spent slowly negotiating my way through roadworks, roundabouts and estates of cheap modern houses. It was particularly grim in the winter.

Finally, there was the huge disappointment when I arrived:

Crawley was a mistake. Once a small, sleepy place on the way to Brighton, it became identified as a potential 'new town' after the end of the Second World War and by the late 1950s the population had increased fivefold, largely due to an influx of Londoners.

At this point, Crawley was regarded as one of the more successful new towns, providing thousands of jobs and affordable homes. Unlike some of its counterparts, Crawley hadn't been ruined by Brutalist architecture and high-rise developments. It was more like an outer London suburb that had been dropped onto a field in Sussex.

But Crawley became the victim of its own success and, in the 1960s, permission was given to expand the town to 120,000 - a twelvefold increase on its 1945 population level. By the 1990s, the town's character had been completely eradicated by over-development and cheap, poorly designed housing.

Ottakar's were generally very astute at picking new sites for the bookshops, but they got it horribly wrong with Crawley. I was surprised, as a quick walk around the town centre would have confirmed that this wasn't bookshop territory - it was as if the middle classes had been ethnically cleansed.

Also, the town centre had seen better days:

As if this wasn't enough, there was already a branch of Waterstone's in the town, so what was the point of my shop? What could we offer our customers?

It would have been easy to feel despondent. I was managing a shop that was only taking 50% of its projected turnover in a town that didn't need another bookshop. Also, all of the bookselling knowledge I'd acquired in London seemed utterly useless (when Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature, our branches in London quickly picked up the phone and ordered all of the backlist. In Crawley, I think they thought that Saramago was the manager of West Ham).

But, curiously, I felt invigorated by my new branch. Anyone can sell books in London - you just put the books on the table and open the doors. But to make a success of shop like Crawley was a real challenge and I knew that if I was going to make it work, I'd have to unlearn everything I knew.

I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow account of what we did, but in less than five years we went from a six-figure loss to being on the verge of breaking into profit. It took a lot of hard work, but the key to our success was that I was trusted to know my local market and allowed to run the shop in the way I saw fit, changing the prices of bestsellers, moving sections that weren't working and experimenting with new ranges.

Here are some of the things we did:

We always tried to make the shop bright, colourful and welcoming, with simple displays that wouldn't be off-putting to people who didn't normally visit bookshops. Tables generally weren't allowed to have more than six different titles and the selection would always reflect the local, rather than national, bestsellers.

Any empty spaces at the end of sections would have handmade displays, with staff reviews highlighting key titles. In this display (probably made by my very talented assistant manager) someone has customised some Ottakar's point-of-sale posters.

Upstairs we had a small branch of Costa Coffee with large, blank walls. I decided to invite local artists and photographers to display their work in the cafe and on the walls of the staircase. This was a huge success and, in a town without any gallery or arts scene, our shop soon became a hub for local artists and craftspeople.

We also had a thriving events programme. A Martin Amis or Ian McEwan signing would have been an embarrassment in Crawley, as our sales of literary fiction were amongst the lowest in the company. But we also enjoyed some of the best sales of children's books and I felt sure that if I could lure Jacqueline Wilson to the shop, it would be a success.

In the end, I made an offer that was hard to refuse and the result was the biggest Jacqueline Wilson signing session of all time, which lasted for eight hours. At one point, the queue was nearly a quarter of a mile long. It was a stressful, but exhilarating, day and I loved seeing how the fans made themselves at home:

When authors came to our shop, we always covered up the bookshelves behind the signing table to create a sense of theatre (if that doesn't sound too precious):

In addition to the Jacqueline Wilson signing, we held a number of events (including some awful New Age evenings that made me cringe with shame) in an attempt to get people through the door. A successful event got us free advertising in the local paper and word-of-mouth publicity.

After five years we almost broke into profit, then the landlords put the rent up. I wasn't very happy.

Ultimately we failed, but I'm convinced that we wouldn't have got as far as we did without being given the freedom to experiment and see what worked. Under HMV, I wouldn't have been able to decide what price to sell a book at or choose which titles went on my front table.

Which brings me to the point of this post. When James Daunt was announced as the new MD of Waterstone's, some people questioned how he would apply his strategy to shops like Crawley, where people just wanted to buy the new Sharon Osbourne for less than Smith's. However, I was encouraged by his assertion that the future of Waterstone's lay with giving power back to the shops and trusting booksellers to know their local market. If he can trust managers to run their shops, then Waterstone's may have a future.

Five years after Waterstone's took over Ottakar's, I feel vindicated. HMV's arrogant assertion that bookselling is no different from any other branch of retail has been proved wrong. In a few weeks time, Waterstone's should be back in the hands of booksellers.

I only hope that it isn't too late for the chain to be saved.

2011-05-23T18:28:00.002Z

The following titles, all found today, are shining examples of how society has changed:

"I say chaps! I've hear that Jenkins has a 6d Rhodesia and Nyasaland - dark blue!"

When did the word 'splendid' become embarrassing to anyone under the age of 75? I've no idea. All I know is that my brain is wired to say great, brilliant or excellent without a hint of irony, but splendid can only be uttered in a Terry Thomas comedy voice.

Manly tales by H. A. Manhood.

I'd never heard of Manhood, but according to this website:

"H. A. Manhood was one of the most highly regarded short story writers of the 1930s. His work was praised by John Galsworthy, Henry Williamson, Hugh Walpole and H. E. Bates, who was to become a good friend. His British and American publishers, Jonathan Cape and Viking respectively, thought so highly of him that they paid him a salary to give him the time and space just to write, a most unusual arrangement which demonstrated their respect for his work. His stories were in demand both from popular papers such as the Evening News and John O’London’s Weekly, and from more literary periodicals such as the London Mercury and the Adelphi."

Next, two titles that are horribly dated:

It's odd to think that covers like these were acceptable only half a century ago How far we've come.

Finally, it's not as kinky as it sounds:

This is actually a Christian book about drug addiction, but I wonder how many middle aged men in dirty macs bought this in error, only to be bitterly disappointed once they'd got back home.

I wonder which of today's books will excite similar shudders of horror and embarrassment?

A Horizontal Journey

2011-05-21T16:57:00.011Z

I'm now back in the land of the living. It was only 'flu, but it was a particularly potent version that involved long episodes of sleep, puntuated by some very strange dreams. I won't relate them here because other people's dreams are always so dull.

I'm not very good at being ill. I think it's probably because I was quite a sickly child and when, at one point, it looked as if I was going to die, I was sent away to a Victorian sanitorium for a year.

Here's the bedroom I used to share with the son of an East End gangster and a boy called Ian, who was described as 'a little backwards':

On the whole I got on well with my roommates, although I wasn't terribly happy about Ian's tendency to defecate on the floor.

I was at the sanitorium for a year and the combination of sea air, good food and a course of vaccinations did the trick. But although I've enjoyed years of good health and can quite happily walk for 20 miles without feeling tired, the merest hint of illness makes me panic. I'm terrified of going back back to the sanitorium.

However, there's also a lot to be said for being forced to lie in bed for six days, particularly if you have a laptop with wireless internet access. Unconstrained by the demands of others, I was able to surf the web for hours, going off on tangential journeys that led to some wonderful discoveries.

Here's the best of what I found:

1. John Krish

If you've heard of the British documentary filmaker John Krish, then I salute you. There's next to nothing about him on Wikipedia. Fortunately, after decades of neglect, a recent DVD release of four of Krish's short films earned him the 'Best Documentary' award at the 2010 Evening Standard Awards.

Here's an extract from John Krish's 1962 documentary 'Our School':

John Krish may not be a household name, but he was responsible for what is arguably the most stylish intro sequence in television history:

2. Daniel Davies - 'The Isle of Dogs'

This is an excellent first novel - one of the best I've read for a long time.

If you want to know what 'The Isle of Dogs' is about, the clue's in the title (and the cover). I wouldn't normally be drawn to a novel about 'dogging', but it was recommended on Amazon for people who liked Jonathan Coe's latest novel (which I didn't like), so I started to read the first chapter. From the first page, I knew that I was in good hands (no sniggering at the back).

The first thing that anyone should know about 'The Isle of Dogs' is that the dogging is purely incidental. Ultimately, this is a philosophical novel about the pursuit of happiness that manages to engage with the big issues without ever taking itself too seriously. I've no doubt that the sexual content has both repelled and attracted people for the wrong reasons, but I found it touching and comic rather than titillating or embarrassing.

Daniel Davies has been compared to Michel Houellebecq and whilst I can see the similarities, he lacks the latter's boorish racism and misogyny. I generally avoid literary criticism on this blog, as so many other people are much better at it, but if you want to know more about 'The Isle of Dogs', I can recommend this interview with the author.

3. Fritz Lang - 'M'

I know that I'm probably the last person to have heard of this film. Apparently it tops polls as one of the greatest German films of all time, but I knew nothing about it. Made in 1931, this was Lang's first 'talkie' and gives a fascinating glimpse into Germany during the Weimar Republic (only two years later, the artistic climate was very different - 'Dr Mabuse' was banned by Goebbels).

'M' is about a man who kills children and 80 years on, it still hasn't lost its power to shock (I can't imagine this film being made in Britain or America). Considering that this was one of the first movies with sound, it's remarkable how well the acting and direction compares with later films. But although it's an ensemble piece, the film is dominated by Peter Lorre as the villian and Gustaf Gründgens as the 'Safecracker', who is concerned that Lorre's activities are making it impossible for the criminal underworld to go about their daily business (Gründgens later became the subject of the 1981 film 'Mephisto').

The first part of the film drags, but the second half is gripping and the final scene, where Lorre is being tried by a kangaroo court of local men and women, in a disused warehouse, is incredibly powerful:

4. Jo Nesbø

When I wasn't suffering from the agues and ranting deliriously about Matron, I felt reasonably alert and needed something to pass the time. I had just finished 'Isle of Dogs' and wanted another novel that was intelligently written, but easy to read (Proust and 'flu don't go together). I'd read everything by Henning Mankell, so what else was there for people who don't normally read crime fiction?

At this point, Amazon came into its own. I checked to see what Henning Mankell readers also liked and saw several glowing reviews for Jo Nesbø. With just a few clicks, I was able to download a sample chapter onto my Kindle and decide for myself.

Five days later, I am a huge Nesbø fan and rate the two novels I've read much more highly than the last Kurt Wallander mystery. Unlike some detectives I could mention, Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole isn't divorced and doesn't have a grown-up daughter with whom he has a difficult relationship, but I'm relieved to say that he is a maverick who has a problem with authority and also drinks too much, so we're still on fairly familiar ground.

The first Harry Hole novel I read was 'Redbreast' and although there was an over-reliance on coincidence, I was impressed by Nesbø's ability to weave several disparate narrative threads together and create credible characters that don't always fall into the stock clichés of crime fiction. Yes, there is a grumpy, misanthropic forensics officer who is on the verge of retirment and there's also the long-suffering boss who gives the protagonist 24 hours/two days/one week to solve the crime before they're taken off the case. But overall this novel was a refreshing change from what I've seen and I enjoyed the Norwegian setting.

By the end of my six days in bed I started to feel better and imagined what life would be like if I could just carry on living like Oblomov, never having to get up again. But back at work the next day, I realised how good it was to feel useful and needed.

I am unwell

2011-05-16T17:45:00.001Z

A Dull Post About the Book Industry

2011-05-11T06:16:00.007Z

Every time I read the trade press, there seems to be yet another story about the growth of e-books. Yesterday alone, the Bookseller published two stories that have huge implications for everyone in the book trade.

The first article covered the 'World e-Reading Congress' in London, where Ian Hudson, the deputy chairman of Random House, announced that their e-book sales had increased tenfold in the last year. Hudson predicted that e-book sales "could exceed 8% of trade publishers' sales in 2011, and could reach 15% next year".

This is interesting, because on the one hand it demonstrates how quickly e-books are growing, but on the other it is a timely reminder that they still account for less than 10% of book sales. If you just listened to Amazon, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was nearer 50%.

The other story that the Bookseller published yesterday is also potentially very significant. Literary über-agent Ed Victor has established a new e-book and print-on-demand imprint, which will initially concentrate on making out of print titles available in a digital format. This may not appear to be earth-shattering news, but it shows that the line between agent and publisher may become increasingly blurred in the future.

So where does that leave the traditional high street bookshop? On they face of it, they seem doomed. E-book sales are growing exponentially, particularly in the more 'disposable' genres like crime fiction (over a third of the latest Jo Nesbø novel's sales were digital).

But although digital publishing may appear to possess the inexorable gravitational pull of a black hole, there are other genres that are far more resistant. For example, this:

I read 'Mr Wonderful' recently after a month in the Kindleverse and fell in love with the paper book all over again.

These comic strips are all available online and I'm sure that they'd be quite easy to read on an iPad, but it would be a very poor substitute for this beautifully-produced hardback, with its thick, sturdy pages, brightly-coloured illustrations and wonderfully absurd dimensions (fully opened, it measures 21" by 6").

I'm not suggesting that bookshops will be saved by bunging a few graphic novels on the front table, but if they are going to survive they need to reduce their dependence on paperback bestsellers and concentrate on genres where the book itself becomes a desirable object. It is this approach that has enabled 'high end' booksellers like Daunt Books to survive, selling hardbacks to people who are looking for quality rather than saving money.

It will be interesting to see what the new owner of Waterstone's does with the chain. At the moment, HMV are locked in negotiations with the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut. HMV want £70,000,000 for Waterstone's - a sum they desperately need if they are to avoid going into administration in July - and gave Mamut a deadline of April 20th to close the deal.

But with each week, HMV's hand becomes weaker. Their share price is now around 10p and Waterstone's latest value is estimated to be nearer £35,000,000, so I suspect that Mr Mamut is quite rightly driving a hard bargain. Why should he pay over the odds for a 300-branch chain that includes a number a loss-making shops when he could hang on for a few weeks and pick off the most profitable shops?

I hope that both parties are able to reach an agreement before HMV Group collapses, for everyone's sake. Aside from the fact that several thousand jobs are at stake, the publishing industry needs a showcase for its titles and the large, range-holding specialist bookseller is still the best option.

I apologise if that was a very dull post. To make up for it, here is a chimpanzee on a skateboard:

"The Past is a Foreign Country"

2011-05-05T16:43:00.006Z

It's a shame that L. P. Hartley's observation has been so overused that it now feels like a banal cliché, but that's the price to be paid for coming up with a good quote. To add insult to injury, Hartley didn't get a penny for it, whereas Lord Dundas (aka David "I've got my blue jeans on - ooh ooh" Dundas) was paid £10 every time his four-note jingle for the Channel Four ident was played. Life can be very unfair.

Anyway, to get to the point, today's illustrations are a good example of how social mores have changed over the last century.

We begin with a fine example of manliness and patriotism:

This heroic image is at odds with the indiscriminate, mechanised slaughter of trench warfare and I wonder what ex-servicemen must have felt when they saw images like this.

Next, we move forward a couple of decades to the Battle of Britain, when the RAF were busy teaching Jerry a lesson:

I expect that someone on the boat is saying "Gott in Himmel!" - one of the three stock phrases that war comics seemed to use (the other two being, of course "Achtung Spitfire!" and "Schweinhund!").

Viz comic once did a great satire of a Victor-style cartoon strip, in which a German submarine hits a Spitfire by firing a torpedo into the air, but its plucky RAF pilot dives underwater and machine-guns the submarine. It is patently absurd, but this 1940s book, featuring 'Flak' the dog, isn't that far removed from the Viz parody.

Sadly, Leonard 'Squiffy' Worthington is eventually shot down and he and Flak are sent to Stalag Luft III, but the ingenuity of the German prisoner of war camp isn't enough to stop man and dog from escaping:

Squiffy and Flak want to get back to England and continue fighting the Hun, so that they can make the world safe for young boys to admire swans:

'"Oh! How jolly!" Bryan exclaimed when first he saw the swan (page 70)'

'When first he saw the swan'? I didn't know that they had Google Translate back in the late 1940s.

Moving forward to 1954, here is a photo featuring 'Fabian of Scotland Yard'. Can you guess which person is Fabian? Also, make sure that you read the winning caption underneath:

Now we're in the lurid, steamy early 60s:

I initialy read the title as 'Sanitorium of Fear' but I think I was drawing from my own experiences.

"All because the bad girl was too much of a good thing"

Finally a very odd cover that looks as if two women are assaulting one of the Osmonds (and even worse, one of them might be Marie Osmond).

When I filled my tank up with diesel this morning, I was appalled to see that the total came to £61 and wondered how long I could afford to keep commuting to work. But after seeing today's selection of books, I know that I'd pay a much higher price if I left.

"I want to support my local bookshop"

2011-05-03T15:07:00.004Z

This YouTube video has been doing the rounds on Facebook recently, shared by several ex-colleagues of mine.

It's an animated video produced at Xtranormal.com - a clever website where anyone can create a cartoon in a matter of minutes and although the expressionless, computer-generated voices sound weird, it somehow adds to the humour.

As for the content, I think that anyone who's ever run a bookshop will agree that it's spot on:

From the 1980s to the 1880s

2011-05-01T21:41:00.009Z

It has been a quiet weekend. On Friday night I reluctantly agreed to go to an 80s disco, which I mistakenly assumed had something to do with the Royal Wedding, but turned out to be a fundraising evening. There wasn't a single person there under 30, apart from a brief moment when two teenagers walked in, took one look and immediately left. I knew how they felt.

It was the quinteseential 80s disco: the music was rubbish, I didn't cop off with anyone and the DJ refused to play The Smiths. I'd forgotten how much I hated evenings like this.

My mother-in-law thinks that the great tragedy of my life was that I was born in the wrong century and that I should have been a country parson in the Victorian age. Sometimes think she's right.

However, I drank a magic potion that enabled me to travel through time (a la 'The Amazing Mr Blunden') to the late 20th century and within an hour I was on the floor dancing (albeit like someone with a slipped disc) to Run DMC, probably cramping Mrs Steerforth's style. Further drinks bought out the inner Travolta and the evening turned out to be almost enjoyable.

Naturally I suffered the next day and rather than go out, decided to spend my time sorting through a new album of Victorian photos that arrived at work last week.

It's a strange album. The photographs have been taken all over the place, including one from Sydney, so it's hard to tell where the family came from. One picture is dated 1881 but I suspect that some may be older, if the fashions are anything to go by. I have included the original captions:

'Great Uncle Brindley, Sydney' - the first Australian studio portrait I've come across. This would have been taken around the same time as Marcus Clarke published 'His Natural Life' - one of the first 'Australian' novels (and a gripping read if you haven't come across it).

'Mrs More' - why isn't the gentleman named?

This group of 'striking' looking people are sadly unnamed

This woman is also unnamed, but she looks uncannily like an ancestor of Cherie Blair

'Aunt Ruth and Aunt Mary' - I don't think that it would be entirely unfair to suggest that Aunt Ruth might have had a few 'issues', if that scowl is anything to go by.

There is clearly no doubt surrounding the paternity of this young girl

'Cecil, Winnie and Irene' - I wonder when these names will come back into fashion?

I shall refrain from passing comment

I like the woman's quietly determined expression

'Grandfather Moore'

'1881'

Undated

These last two photographs are also unnnamed and undated. Are the mother and daughters in mourning?

Finally, three plates from a Victorian children's book published in 1881:

At work, we have a growing archive of colour plates from the ninetenth century, but the novelty value still hasn't worn off and I feel excited whenever I find one.

Maybe I need to go to more discos.

"If I Could Find Anything Blacker Than Black, I'd Use It"

2011-04-28T16:57:00.018Z

Two days ago, my reputation as a member of the middle class intelligensia was almost in tatters.

It started innocently enough. I was talking about the Royal Wedding with some people from North London and unthinkingly remarked that I thought that Kate Middleton would make a lovely queen. Obviously this was the wrong thing to say. If you are a Guardianista, you must regard the Royal Family and everything they do as an absurd and rather vulgar anachronism. I had committed a thoughtcrime.

Luckily, I got away with it. My companions thought that I was satirising the cap-doffing attitudes of Middle England and laughed politely, unaware that my statement was free of any irony or cynicism.

"She'll be a lovely queen."

But the whole sorry episode weighed heavily on my conscience. I knew that I had committed a major transgression and only an act of atonement would enable me to look my fellow cognoscenti in the eye. But what? A box of organic vegetables or a bottle of artisan-made balsamic vinegar wouldn't be enough this time. I had to perform the Hadj.

The following morning, I began a long, difficult journey of pilgrimage to Margate, home of the newest contemporary art gallery.

Margate was once a promised land for the working classes. Families could escape from the drudgery and, sometimes, squalor of their daily lives and spend a couple of weeks in a fantasy world of music hall shows, fairground rides and sunshine:

But the two weeks passed too quickly and then it was back to the unlived life. For many Eastenders, the dream was that one day they would go back to Margate and never leave, spending their final days breathing fresh air. The whole town was fuelled by working class dreams (although, incongrously, Eliot wrote the third part of 'The Waste Land' here: 'On Margate Sands. I can connect nothing with nothing').

The last time Margate really buzzed with life was in the 1960s, when mods and rockers terrorised the bank holiday crowds:

Then the package holiday arrived. People quickly realised that for the same amount of money they could have a holiday in Spain, where the sunshine was almost guaranteed. Like many so British coastal resorts, Margate went into a long, slow decline, beset by high unemployment and under-investment.

Which brings us to the present. How do you revitalise a depressed area? Industry is no longer an option and the dreaded 'retail park' may create a few hundred jobs (if you can persuade retailers to set up in a town with no money), but it's a Faustian pact which ultimately does more harm than good to the local economy.

The only answer is to attract more middle class people into the town and the best way of doing that is to build an art gallery.

Once, the notion that an economically depressed town could be revived with an art gallery (and a modern art gallery at that!) would have sounded absurd, like something out of Sim City, but the evidence is irrefutable.

The phenomenal success of the Tate Modern, which opened in 2000, has shown that contemporary art is far more popular than many people believed and the last decade has seen an unprecedented number of successful gallery openings; many in very unlikely places. When these galleries opened, people were suprised by how quickly new businesses started to appear.

This was the rationale behind the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It wasn't a universally popular idea - many locals would have prefered a leisure centre - but the gallery had some very vocal supporters, including local girl Tracy Emin:

(If the Royal Family met with an unfortunate end, I would quite happily install Tracy Emin as the next queen of England)

Like all great building projects, the plans and budget for the Turner Contemporary underwent a number of revisions and compromises, but thanks to the tenacity of its supporters, the gallery was eventually opened earlier this month by Emin and Jools Holland.

From a distance, the Turner Contemporary is underwhelming, but the gallery is more impressive as you get closer:

Designed by Sir David Chipperfield, the Turner Contemporary boldly faces the sea. Some have questioned the logic of placing a valuable art collection in such a vulnerable position, but the building feels very solid.

I was pleased to see that the steps were packed with visitors and as I walked through the entrance, I was struck by how the building was already buzzing with energy, less than a month after opening:

This atrium is hugely impressive - a wonderful use of space involving mirrored walls and this stunning view of the sea:

I wasn't completely convinced by the steps up to the first floor. Inspired by Turner's enigmatic last words, which could have meant either "The sun is god", "The son is God" or "The sun is God", this all looked a bit like something out of art college:

But I liked the next exhibit. I tried to read what it was all about, but there were so many people in the gallery I became distracted and decided to read more on the gallery's website when I got home, but oddly there doesn't seem to be much content about the exhibits.

As far as I can tell, it's a mural of work by young people from Margate and reflects on the town's past, present and hopes for the future:

I wish that I'd read the blurb more thoroughly.

This section contains the great Turner quote "If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it."

At this point, I should explain (for anyone who is blissfully unaware of the Turner Contemporary) where Turner comes into the story. This is from the gallery's website:

“Where therefore, and in this very town of Margate, he lived, when he chose to be quit of London, and yet not to travel” John Ruskin

Turner’s connection with Margate was the founding inspiration for our organisation. He loved Margate for the sea, the skies, and his landlady Mrs Booth.

He first came to the seaside town aged 11, having been sent by his parents to school in Love Lane in Margate. He returned to sketch here aged 21 and from the 1820s onwards became a regular visitor.

Visitors who are expecting a collection of Turner paintings will be disappointed. There is only one picture in the collection, although the gallery hopes to remedy this. Admittedly it's a pretty impressive painting, but did it really need a 'tensabarrier' in front?

This installation looked promising:

Inside, there is a collection of backlit engravings of Margate. It's a nice, contemporary take on the traditional 19th century engraving and the images are really good, but unfortunately it is impossible to look at them without seeing a reflection of the works on the wall behind. It's a great pity and I'm surprised that nobody has done anything about this (a simple black curtain across the centre would solve the problem).

This remarkable installation, by Conrad Shawcross, was far more successful:

In the art world, people are forever talking about 'the space' as being almost as important as the exhibits and in general, I'd agree. The Turner Contemporary is a fantastic 'space', but there's just a little too much of it. I would have liked to have seen some more exhibits. There is clearly some work to be done (including the amount of content on the website), but the gallery has got off to a good start.

At the moment, to coin Dr Johnson's description of the Giant's Causeway, the Turner Contemporary is "worth seeing, but not worth going to see", at least, if your journey is longer than a couple of hours. It took me over three hours to make the 90-mile trip from Lewes.

On the plus side there's a nice cafe in the gallery and it's only a matter of time before a succession of chi-chi resaturants and shops appear in this nearby road:

The future definitely looks brighter for Margate. Sadly, this will be the last new gallery in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Even if the Turner Contemporary doesn't have enough exhibits to justify a day trip, there's plenty to see in Margate and if you prefer your resorts to be a little more genteel, Broadstairs is only a couple of miles away:

I've never been to this part of Kent before and was impressed by the number of quirky, interesting buildings, including the original model for 'Bleak House', which towers above the beach:

Charles Dickens was a big fan of Broadstairs:

I had obviously come on a quiet day:

As Dickens might have said, "I searched in vain for a fish and chip emporium that was open for travellers and instead, decided to embark on an agreeable perambulation of the town's environs".

The alleys and back streets revealed many eccentric features, like this nautical gate:

It goes without saying that I am a big fan of 'David Copperfield', so I didn't miss the chance to visit the house which was owned by the model for Betsey Trotwood and now contains the Dickens Museum. It's strange to think the young Dickens sat in this very room:

The museum was a little disappointing. Apart from a few letters written by the author, it was mainly a collection of Dickens-related ephemera (with no pictures of Steerforth), but with an entrance fee of around £3, it was still worth a visit.

I finished the day by having a brief drink in Deal with an old schoolfriend. He has just joined a French punk band and told me some hilarious stories, which would be a whole blog post in itself. I know that he hates anything to do with blogging and social networking, so I will shamelessly steal his anecdotes.

After our drink, I began the ridiculously long journey back to Lewes. At first I resented the fact that it took over three hours to make a 90-mile journey, but on reflection, if we had more motorways and better rail links, everywhere would turn into commuterland.

Tower Power

2011-04-24T12:35:00.007Z

Last year, my mother-in-law was struggling to think of something to buy me for my birthday and asked if there was anything that I particularly wanted. There wasn't. I live in a small house that's under permanent siege from an army of plastic toys and DVDs - one more thing would only add to the clutter. But I still wanted a present.

Then I realised that what I needed was an experience, not a possession. I knew that my mother-in-law had just enjoyed a private tour of the Tower of London and asked if she could arrange one for me. I'd been to the Tower once as a child, but the sight of hordes of badly dressed, bumbelt-wearing tourists had put me off making a return visit.

A private viewing was the perfect solution.

The tour was booked for last Wednesday and I can't stress how satisfying it was to walk past the long queue of tourists and have a Beefeater lift up a rope to let me in. Queue jumping is a petty, slightly malicious pleasure that plays to my vain conceit that I'm a cut above the hoi polloi (I know I'm not, but it's fun pretending for a few minutes).

Once we were inside the Tower complex, I was struck by how separate it felt from the rest of London, as if we were in an independent city state like the Vatican, with only a tenuous connection to the present. Everywhere we looked, there were reminders of the Tower's sad, brutal history.

I knew about some of the more famous executions: Thomas Moore, Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey, but this anecdote was new to me:

'In 1541, it was the turn of the 71-year-old Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, whose offence was being the last surviving member of the Plantagenet dynasty, overthrown by the Tudors. The Countess refused to place her head on the block, and had to be chased around the green by the executioner, who hacked her to death.' (From www.icons.org)

If you like your historical buildings to be a bit "Hey-nonny-no", where you can almost hear the sound of lutes playing, I'd recommend Hampton Court Palace. The Tower of London is all about power and retribution. Initially built to dissuade the English from rebelling against their new masters, it is now said to be the only building in London that would still be standing in a thousand years if we all suddenly became extinct.

At one point my mother-in-law turned to me and said "Well, you must have one and a half blog posts here." But I haven't. What can you say about 900 years of history that hasn't already been said?

One of the highlights of the visit was seeing the tomb of Sir Thomas More, which is in the crypt of St Peter ad Vincula. The crypt isn't open to the public and I was told that very few people are allowed to see it:

I was going to start writing about how much I admire Sir Thomas More, but I quickly realised that the entire basis of my knowledge comes from watching Paul Schofield in 'A Man For All Seasons', so it's probably better to shut up. However, it is a very good film and this final scene is very moving:

The other highlight of the visit was seeing Henry VIII's suit of armour, with it's absurd codpiece. Apparently, in the 16th century, it was fashionable to accentuate the male features (but mitigate the female ones):

This Cylon-style armour was made in the 1540s, when Henry had put on a few pounds. But there were also other suits of armour from the days when Henry was the svelte renaissance prince who composed 'Pastime with Good Company'. It was the first and last time a member of the Royal Family wrote a chart hit.

If you're not familiar with the song, here's my crude, two-part arrangement:

Not a bad tune is it? Sorry about the performance.

Once we'd seen the armour, we decided to give the Crown Jewels a miss and decamp to the nearest pub. As I nursed my thirst-quenching pint of Amstell, I reflected on how lucky I was to be born in a more civilised age.

Just as I thought this, a City banker entered with a much younger woman who clearly wasn't his wife, and found a discreet booth where they couldn't be spotted by any colleagues:

We may not hack elderly duchesses to death, but greed, lust and betrayal still have their part to play in London life.

The Short Good Friday

2011-04-22T18:36:00.005Z

RIP Elisabeth Sladen (or Goodbye Sarah Jane Smith)

2011-04-19T21:19:00.005Z

I was really upset to hear this evening's announcement that the actress Elisabeth Sladen has died at the age of 63, after a long (and well hidden) struggle with cancer. I suspect that a lot of people of my age, who were children in the 1970s, will mourn the death of 'Sarah Jane'.

It's strange how we can let so many tragic news stories wash over us, but feel genuine grief when a much-loved television presenter or actor from our childhood dies. I suppose it's not just because we feel an affection for them, but also because they were part of that secure wall that protects us from the uncomfortable reality of our own mortality. Every time a well-known figure from the older generation dies, the wall weakens and the world becomes slightly less familiar.

The following clip shows Elisabeth Sladen's final scene in Doctor Who (until she revived the character of Sarah Jane Smith 30 years later). It's particularly moving now and also shows what a great actress she was, portraying a character that was both ballsy and vulnerable at the same time:

But it won't just be people of my generation who'll be upset. Elisabeth Sladen's career underwent a spectacular renaissance four years ago with the 'Sarah Jane Adventures'.

What am I going to tell my sons?