Pop Up Books and Rubbish Bins
Robin Ince's Normally Weird Tour Diary - Entry 3
I arrive at Hemel Hempstead station and remember that this is one of those stations that is some distance from the location it claims to be.
Tring, two stops on, is a considerable distance from the town centre which promises dressed fleas in its natural history museum. The museum also has many many dogs, it is Baskervillian in its possible hauntings.
It is a bright day, so even the more brutal corners of the concrete shopping promenade have their dread washed away. A thin stretch of park is in full Spring and looks like a 1960s postcard where the colorising machine has been turned up to full, Powell and Pressburger could live here.
Hemel Hempstead is not the first library of the year, but the first officially on my Normally Weird tour.
Once in the library, I seek out some large print Mills and Boon to introduce my poem about the carousels of romance in the mobile libraries of Cambridgeshire.
After the tales and poems, I chat away and agree to a gig for the Hemel Hempstead Quakers who are feeling the agony of the world at the moment and need some cheerleading. Let the cruel and the rotten not steal the last of our smiles, the best rebellion needs joy in its heart and love in its arms.
The evening is Berkhamsted bookshop.
My eldest sister is in, she will be my roadie for the next four days. There is a great sense of community in the audience. The questions are many and varied. People tell me the book is very honest, at times almost shockingly for some. Sometimes I think, “have I said too much?” And then I think, are we all too silent, masking as our flesh and bones and thoughts gnaw away at us. I have maybe 100 destinations and shows in the next 80 days so think it is best I don’t go to the pub.
I go to the pub.
Tuesday is Cambridgeshire libraries - bricks and mortar not wheels and chassis.
I sit in Huntingdon library, chatting with readers, occasionally signing.
I recommend some books to a young mother and then see some Dr Seuss’s are in the 20 pence sale so tell her such things cannot be left behind. I love the excitement of books. Darren, the mobile librarian, has sorted today’s events. Like many I meet along the way with this new book, it was in middle age that he found out who he was meant to be.
Now he knows he is meant to be a librarian and he loves it.
We have a little gap before St Neots library so wonder through Huntingdon admiring the rubbish bins which celebrate the grumpy reign of the joy-despising Oliver Cromwell. Oh, how he must hate it when the the multi-coloured wrappers of ice lollies shriek with delight in him as the children sugar rush happily away.
We pop to a charity bookshop, The Next Chapter. I buy a WG Sebald hardback and, unusually, am drawn to something that says “Daily Express” on it. It is a children’s annual from 1930 with the most splendid and pristine pop up scenes of mermaids, flowers and albatross. Rather than “pop ups” they are described as “self erecting models”. We go to cafe and peruse the healthy options. My sister has a very green salad with Quinoa. I am unable to have that as the seeds can become bullets when public speaking. I opt for a strawberry milkshake and fries.
St Neot’s library is a talk. I tell my story about the actor Colin Jeavons and someone on the front row says, “I am the mother in law of one of his sons”.
When I throw it open to questions, the bookseller is the first to pipe up.
“Yes, my question is ‘what is your book called and what is it all about?’”
It seems I forgot to mention such fripperies in the talk about my book.
John Dowie is in the audience. I often turn to a piece he wrote called Why I Gave Up Stand Up Comedy. He is wise, but being from Birmingham, he bristles at compliments. We retire to his home and he shows the museum of him which includes his love of Batman from th4e Saturday morning serial days and a press cutting about the beautifully humane Neil Innes. We talk of our mutual love of The Lady Vanishes and Dead of Night. My sister and I depart with a book each. She takes John’s The Freewheeling John Dowie (we talked about it some years ago on Book Shambles) and his new book Before I Go. We all know that books are where the ghosts live and his memories of his father and mother make them vivid again.
And so to Letchworth Garden City and the wonderful David’s. By good fortune, the art section has been shuttered up which has probably saved me a lot of money (it is fabulous).
I eat cake, gulp tea, and browse in the secondhand bookshop in the dimming upstairs of the shop. I leave with a small book of Beckett and a sixties book by an academic infuriated by free love and long haired bongoists in public parks.
There is a beautiful energy in the room and, again, so many questions.
One person says that they feel left out in the world of minds that veer from the emaciated path of normality because they are bipolar (bipolar is not on the neurodivergent list). We discuss the ham-fisted nature of labels and how much overlap there is in many conditions separated in the encyclopaedia of brain functions and other disturbances of peace.
Back at my sister’s house, I watch four episodes of I, Jack Wright, a new thriller about a family feuding over money from an aggressive patriarch’s will. The series was filmed in the house I grew up in, indeed, the house I am sitting in as I watch it. John Simm thieves jewellery from the bedroom I was born in and I am glad to see that the Geoff Dyer book I bought my dad is in shot.
I was listening to The Idiot by Iggy Pop and Careful of Your Keepers by This is The Kit
I am currently reading Birding by Rose Ruane
Bookshops that helped in this 36 hours were
Next Page Books, Hitchin
The Berkhamsted Bookshop
Niche Books and Comics, Huntingdon
Waterstones, St Neots
More tour dates at robinince.com
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