Sometimes you don’t even realise what you’ve been missing. Or how much you’ve been missing it. I went to our local bookshop, the lovely Pages of Hackney, to pick up a book that I had ordered and that had to come from the US.1

They’ve stayed in business through this mad year, and I’ve ordered several books from them in that time. If a book’s not in stock they can usually get it in in a couple of days. I just had to walk up the road and collect them at the door.

No going in, though. Apart from collecting an order, all I could do was look in the window.

So it was fantastic to be able to go into the shop and browse. I’d almost forgotten what that’s like.

  1. The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick. I don’t know why it had to cross the ocean. ↩︎