In which I almost experience a normal Saturday

Saturday 3rd November

The Shop.

It's been three weeks since I was last in The Shop and in that time there has been something of a change. Not so long ago, it seemed that all the staff were leaving and being replaced with Ladies, which was a good thing and made The Shop a nice place to be for a while. (well, I exaggerate. A Tolerable place to be). Now though, most of the Ladies have sensibly run for the hills and been replaced with blokes again. Not only that, but blokes who all look a bit the same so that, with the inclusion of myself, The Shop now seems to be entirely populated by thin men with sticky-up hair and thick-rimmed glasses. Now, some might argue that this could be said of all bookshops, which is a fair point - there is a certain breed of skinny man, usually with thick-rimmed glasses, often in a brown pullover, whose natural gravitation is towards the bookshop - an undemanding habitat in which they can gangle around having pseudo-intellectual conversations about books and planning a variety of false-start second careers. In this respect, The Shop could be seen to be bringing itself inline with other - normal - bookshops. In all other respects however, The Shop remains the bastion of nonsense and inefficiency we're familiar with.

The day passed away quietly enough and at six I went home, the way that normal people do. Then, even more remarkably, I went out on a Saturday night the way normal people do. I'd persuaded Tom to stop in Ealing on his way home from Taplow where he'd been up to Buddhist things, and Brian came out and joined us shortly afterwards. I don't see Tom half as often as I'd like to, since he's at least as busy as I am and probably even moreso. He's currently directing a new opera for a secondary school, which is giving him headaches and driving him into the arms of Mother Beer. This is almost unprecedented for Tom, who as a lifelong Diabetic shunned booze for many years before eventually discovering the joy of wine. As his career progresses however, heis appreciation of alcohol has grown proportionally and our Tom has finally discovered beer, which I am finding fairly hilarious. In fact, a generally hilarious evening ensued as we wandered from our favourite pub, the Red Lion, up to Pizza On The Green and spent a very jolly time, which was exactly what I needed.