The old man in the second-hand bookshop

The man in the bookshop waits for me. I assume he does, a little bit in his heart every day.

When you come up from London to Edinburgh you notice how nice life could be. When it’s sunny it’s even more striking. Better dogs, more frequent snatches of conversation and shared nods and alrights. And here in Edinburgh you get called ‘pal’ in tempered tones of aggression always, and it feels nice. Manageable. Friendly without overdoing it. Not wanky.

I passed Greyfriar’s Bobby with his metallic snub nose, all naked and shiny from being over-rubbed. I got crisps with my sandwich instead of salad, because eating out means not having to be healthy and enjoying life. I pass a charity shop every five hundred meters filled with cardigans and desks (and one cat in the window) and it makes me happy. Edinburgh has to be one of the most pleasant cities to live in. But likely if I said that to someone in passing they’d condescend the comment like a Londoner with ‘If you can afford it’ but then again maybe they’re all just capitalising and hitching up the prices threefold whilst the Festival’s on. I would. Because the southerners coming up here with their selfie-sticks and lack of self-awareness think coffee is worth £4.50 so serve it to them for that.

There is one second-hand bookshop with its shelves immaculately ordered in to categories: modern drama, crime, classical drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, American literature, history, ancient history and gardening. Everything really. I asked the white-haired man in the light-blue short-sleeved shirt, ‘Do you have any books by Jonathan Coe?’ because I had finished one of his stranger novels on the train ride up and I was totally intrigued.

The bookshop owner had in fact approached me whilst I was in the fiction section looking up authors’ surnames, I was in section C already and he had just caught me in the nick of time to lend me a helping hand right when I needed it. Good intervention. He seemed glad I knew what I was looking for; so he could actually be helpful I predict because you must get nonsensical requests working in a book store, as we all remember from Notting Hill and Dylan Moran’s acting part.

‘You're in the right place,’ he said with a smile that said I’m proud of you for knowing your alphabet and index systems ‘let me have a look for you.’ He bends down and searches the spines with his index finger.

‘Anything will do’ I say trying to be helpful, but of course I do want that specific author so not anything.

‘Nothing on the shelf.’ He says with not a slump in mood but a wistfulness.

‘Sorry. Coe comes in a lot but we don’t seem to have him in stock.’ He seems amused by it, like he should know where the author was hiding in the book store but has lost all recollection of where he saw him last.

‘That’s absolutely fine.’ I say.

I’m more pleased to have met the old man than to have found this book. I won’t tell him that because that’s too much feeling from a customer I presume. It’s sunny outside and I will keep welling up with feeling whilst my romance with this city lasts (two more days at the most).

The next day and the next day, and the next few days after that, I pass his second-hand bookshop and I see it every time but daren’t go in.

Not out of fear or awkwardness as such, I am not sure why, maybe because I like the illusion of the story I am playing in my head every time I walk past and see in the shop window display not one but two Jonathan Coe books staring at me from behind the glass. I don’t even pause infront of the window incase he sees me and waves at me to come in, or points at the two books with his friendly face and warm heart.

I should just go in.

It would probably make his day.

But what if I did.

And he didn’t remember who I was.

What if he went to all that trouble.

To find those books and put them out.

But what if they’d been out in the window all along.

And he had forgot.

What if they are meaningless.

And the books don’t mean a thing.

That's why I’ll leave it.

Yes much nicer to leave it.

Because I like the story better.

Than ever finding out the truth.

  

 

A Moment of Truth

What do you notice when you’re back from a place that not only speaks a wholly separate language from your own but has different set ideas for architecture, cuisine, ethics, everything. Well not much because you’re sort of overcome by the ambivalent wonder of -

Lucky me. I got to go see that.

Once back, and after recounting some things in anecdotal detail you have to get on with what’s normal. Jobs, commutes, online banking, everything. 

It’s only when you’re stood on a footstool gazing out of a clear windowpane with the microwave thrumming innocuous radiation at your head that you think about what it all meant. Those sights, those people, those food stuffs. The kindness of all those people so far away from us now that they’re a little speck in a different time zone – not just a different space zone. 

That mega 18 hour trip from the London Underground Piccadilly Line to my hometown of Kasukabe; (you always start at the beginning when you recount something don’t you? It’s funny because the beginning is the least significant part because nothing has happened yet. It must mean we like the feeling of something about to happen, not the actual happening. That’s probably why life can be disappointing.) 

You think afterwards, what could top that? Not another holiday, surely. Well quite. I don’t want to be living a life which is mostly me taking time out from it. Telling the whole world on my dating profile that my hobbies consist of ‘travelling, going out there with open arms to explore and experience what the world has to offer my bared soul’ and ‘food. Eating is discovery, much like travelling, I think that when you’re eating food from different countries you're widening your horizons and learning about foreign cultures too.’ Etc. I don’t want to just be taking holidays for the rest of time. 

So you set to thinking, was it the holiday aspect of it that you miss? If coming back has stopped you from writing then what’s that about? Is it simply catching up with friends, your workload and washing? Partly yes. But it also means something’s changed irretrievably. It sounds dramatic, perhaps it is, but a gear got stuck when I got back. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, if anything, I was at a stand still. 

But something has been brewing for several days. A concoction; a thought which I didn’t have quite enough empirical evidence to muster out of conjecture. An inkling it has been, an awakening it is. 

Part of being an adult is being helpless. 

Not helpless like a child who can’t open a jar. Helpless like an adult who has to carry weighty news that they’d rather drop in the bin but can’t because it’s called responsibility. Meeting people who have integrity and knowing you are imprudent. Trying to procure an ounce of sympathy from within when you see a fellow human suffering but you can’t seem to understand why or care. All those “Big Thoughts” as Sam Simmons (comedian) would say. 

Listless may be the word to describe that day. I had been feeling belittled by an app which managed to translate a Japanese word perfectly for me after I had struggled with it all day. I had this immense dislike for this app, which took away my struggle so easily, like someone who says they’ve solved all your problems but makes you feel inferior so they’ve given you another problem all together. And whilst sitting at the bottom of my carpeted staircase thumbing my phone and breathing deeply, I had this very clear realisation what being an adult meant. Responsibility, knowledge, wider resources, yes to all of that but really, it means making do with the bloody truth.

Even if that truth is emotionally draining, or the answer to the question is I don't know, or you secretly accept cruelty because it’s not your problem, or that money really matters a lot. I mean it’s all so draining and yet it’s all true. And we have to Eat. It. Up. but also live life like it isn’t true, otherwise what would you ever get out of bed for? 

Making do with the truth is like the tale of Father Christmas, where you know it’s not real but the joy of pretending it’s real for the sake of a child makes life worthwhile. Or if you’re about to go inside for a bollocking from an authority figure but you’re outside and the sun is shining and the air is balmy and everything smells sweet, that bit of life makes the rest of life however morose, seem pretty good. When you get to feel lucky for a moment before it peters away in to a life of mundane expectations, and if you got asked by the devil ‘would you like to do it all again?’ you probably wouldn’t bother. 

There’s nothing bad about being cynical. The best piece of news I’ve read since being back in the UK (and this is actually interesting rather than all these soapsuds I’ve left strewn across the web) is that being unhappy does not affect your mortality. As in, research had often detected a link between people being unhappy and people dying earlier than the rest of the population, which would lead society to think unhappy people die faster. But in fact we had just got the causes and effects mixed up. Unhappiness and death correlate but they aren’t linked, so people who are unhappy tend to be sick and so more likely to have a shorter life span. But those who are perfectly healthy and unhappy live just as long as the happy buggers. So that’s something isn’t it, after coming back from the halcyon that was Japan with the boyfriend and the family who are all alive and healthy. Even if I get really unhappy about life for some reason, death won’t come to me any quicker. And that piece of knowledge actually made me happy.

photo by Aidan Clifford