Sunday 14 November 2010

Local: a moveable feast



I wandered into The Travel Bookshop off Portobello Road yesterday with a copy of Days and Nights in W12 and they reckoned on taking three copies until a passing customer seized on the sample book and enthused – it brings to book the streets she walks every day – and they revised the order to ten copies.

Neither I nor Jack Robinson usually ventures far from W12. Except for the seaside, most of life is already here. The second photo shows a green parrot at my neighbour’s bird-feeder this morning. (And you don’t have to live in W12, or even W11 or any other postcode, to get something from this book; a cover quote from Gabriel Josipovici manages to include references to Sebald, Bernhard and Walter Benjamin in a single sentence). But tomorrow I and two, possibly three, of the CBe writers are off to experience a few days and nights in Paris, starting with a reading at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore.

No comments: