This lunchtime, Borders bookshop/café/newsagents: having picked up a couple of special offer items, I’m on my way out into the street when I notice the two Georges—“Gorgeous” Galloway and “Moonbat” Monbiot that is—at 20 percent off. As always I have my long-suffering Minolta with me, so I get it out of my rucksack and uncap the lens in front of the ranks of discounted paperbacks, ready to freeze this pleasing vista for you, my loyal reader. Instantly a scrawny media studies graduate type with a glued-on-doghair beard and a headset is upon me. “I’m afraid you can’t take photographs in the store, sir.”
“What the fuck is a ‘store’, nosewipe? Do you know who I am? I am PooterGeek, freewheeling Internet superstar, and you are a mere wageslave, a pre-programmed ‘bot, scuttling along your short and narrow channel in the great global grid of capitalism, parroting the line fed to you by the masters of your faceless franchise,” I say, slapping his furry cheek with a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How To Achieve Stress-Free Productivity.
No. I just put my camera away and walk out. But I give him a scowl he won’t forget in a long time.
How long before Borders serve me with a writ for describing a display in one of their shops?
Guess who I saw, at a party last night, PG? She was wearing black, btw.
Well, at least there was one good book in the store. I had to get my copy of that excellent tome from the States.
My local library has so trimmed its American history section that it now comprises nothing but the rantings of Moore and his fellow cashers-in-on-crisis. As appropriate as Der Sturmer in a synagogue, but more subtle as befits this latest retread of ancient bigotry.
Borders: when you are trying to listen to a bit of a CD you are thinking of buying, the bloody pop music bellowing out from their cafe section defeats your intentions. Twerps!
I was in Borders today as well (3 for 2: Albert Camus – The Outsider, Huxley’s Brave New World and Luc Besson’s Arthur and the Minimoys).
I noticed a large number of women coming into the store, as I paid for my books, clutching a largely orange covered hardback book. Looking to a sign as I left I noticed that non-other than Donny Osmond would be performing a book-signing in an hour’s time. Well, it’s better than Galloway.
Pictures are verboten in the whole of the Bullring centre in Birmingham. A couple of months ago when I was in the Lego shop with a friend and our children, we were stopped from taking photographs like this. I have since found out this was a policy put in place because of the risk of terrorism, because as we know, terrorists will wander about with a Canon DSLR and a posse of children when casing up future bombing campaigns (and ignore the BBC webcams of the same area).
Hey, if you’re ever at the Borders on Charing Cross Road, call me! My office is just around the corner (literally).
The most annoying things about the Galloway and Monbiot books is that they’re under some section entitled “Save the World” or some such crap.
Anastacias comment on the Booker shortlist (from Guardian Culturevulture blog)
HAY WHAT ABOWT DAN BROWNS DA IVNCE CODE THAT IS BRYLLYANT U R ALL FILISTEINS WHO R THESE AUTHORS COETZEE ISHIGURO SMITH? DIDINT ISHIGURO DIRECT THE RING? THAT IS GR8. NOMI WATTS IS GODESS. WHY DID MCEWANS SATURDAY NOT CTU IT? IT WOZ THE BEST BOOK ABOWT FUTBALL EVER.
Posted by Maggie, the text pest librarian on September 9, 2005 01:20 AM.
Thanks, Jackie. I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.
You are a minx, Linda.