Yesterday, after a morning of errands in a particularly nice area near me, I stopped off at my local(ish) bookshop, which is a small but popular place in the middle of a mostly-residential street. It’s tiny, but contains all the good books; the people who run it known them all and will chat at length about them; and they have a coffee machine and cake. Chocolate Guinness cake, yesterday, so I ordered tasty things, borrowed a pen, and sat outside for half an hour to make lists in my notebook and generally pretend I was in a nice movie for a few minutes. Once I ran out of lists to make, I bothered to look at the window display and there, as in all bookshop windows this week, was Helen Fieldings’ new Bridget Jones book, Mad About the Boy, which I’d temporarily forgotten existed, what with Eleanor Catton winning the Man Booker Prize and so forth. (Obviously that’s what distracted me. Shut up.) Continue reading “And they all lived once upon a time” →