The Ole 'Good Bibliophile, Bad Bibliophile' Psychological Hustle.

Robin Ince's Normally Weird Tour Diary - Day 4

My sister and I amble slowly down the verdant roads of the English countryside to Abingdon, imagining the rural idyll of cottages you could imagine John Thaw impatiently waiting outside. The stiff door opened, he falls in love with the occupant who will be singing La Traviata in a cloister, but whose destiny is to me murdered before the first aria.

My destination is Mostly Books. They had warned me that being midweek on a sunny day it might be quiet, but that is of no concern. Just as I am happy to play bookshops that only fit an audience of nine, I am happy to just pop in and say hello. I sign a few books for customers and chat awhile, then meet the bookshop dog.

I love dogs. They were so much part of family life as I grew up and now I love them because they are the perfect partner when avoiding human contact at hectic house parties.

I pop to the next door Oxfam and I am immediately drawn to the heaviest books - the first eleven issues of a magazine called Arts and Artists from the 1960s, littered with pop art and experimentalism, it must be mine.

I tell the manager they may well see me again as I have also eyed up two bound collections of Sight and Sound which include articles by Susan Sontag on Ingmar Bergman, just my sort of monochromatic melancholy psychiatric delight. I go into the bookshop office for my interview with BBC Scotland and wait a while and then realise it is not until tomorrow.

This gives me enough time to return to Oxfam for those heavy heavy Sight and Sound (physically and psychologically).

I wait for my sister in the market square on the happy to chat bench that circles a tree - “sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello”.

In Oxford, I seek the Tolkien bench where I am meeting a photographer for the one bit of media attention Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal has, an interview in The Times (I fear the deeply unhelpful Age of Diagnosis has lapped up all the neurodivergent book attention - the progressive will always get less space than the progressive - I think of the Clive James poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered and I am Glad”)

The moment Sarah arrives I know we will get on she - she is vibrating in the world at a similar speed to me, so we bubble with ideas involving cowslips, precarious trees and dandelions, but first we grew that we better get the more boring photograph that will most likely get used in the can.

Then we yomp into the woods. Josie from Pan Macmillan gets called in to aid with light reflection and yomps through the brambles, while my sister goes off in search of dandelions ready for blowing. Sarah is the perfect photographer for me, fireworks of the mind collide.

In the midst of dispersing dandelion seeds, Josie reminds us that I also have to go to Blackwells to talk. I collide with pals on the way to get coffee and they tell me I am on in 5 minutes so they generously take over my coffee order and add indulgent cakes.

It is a lovely mix of people as ever, including a ten year old autistic lad who has wonderfully eager questions and late diagnosed autistic women who pulse with the new power of understanding (not a label - a road map, a user’s manual for our mind).

A drink in the pub and talk of blacksmithing, then back to the house I was born in.

Haddenham Community Library is the first destination. Today is the official publication day of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal and a community library seems a lovely location to officially start the race.

I have an interview with BBC Scotland at 2pm so tell the audience that there will be a hard out the moment my phone rings , but I will return for questions.

At 2pm, the phone rings and I wander outside and start the interrogation live from Glasgow. The Book House from Thame has come to be the bookseller, and as I stand in the half shade, a few people cheerily depart with signed , books in hand and we wave at each other. Most have remained, so at 2.25 I return to the shelves, “now where were we?”

Of all the book tours I have done, this is the one with the most audience questions, sometimes sad questions, sometimes happy comments, often, just curiosity thriving. The pillar of the library is full of enthusiasm and stories, and we talk of the importance of literacy projects inside prisons. Many people in prison have limited literacy and may also be neurodivergent.

My friend Alistair has worked in prisons for many years, creating fabulous projects that give those inside new possibilities. He was handily diagnosed with dyslexia just after he left school. The diagnosis immediately gave him an understanding of why there were certain things he found more difficult and how this was not due to “stupidity”, just the way his mind work. Then he began a life of being an autodidact. His novel The Sentence was written without punctuation and using only monosyllabic words because he had discovered the issues inmates had with reading. It is like reading a brilliant spell and I have participated in a live reading of it that spun the minds of readers and audience. This especially came to the fore when audience members got up to go to the bar or toilets, as individual readers would be pointed at and told to follow them and continue the reading beyond the confines of the stage.I nearly walked right into the cubicle with one of the audience members.

When I visited a prison with Alistair, one off the inmates was desperate to read me a poem he had written.The pride in his eyes that he now had a new tool to navigate the world was clear to see in his eyes. Alistair’s latest work is a collection of his experimental fiction - Songs of Insolence and Exoedience - the cover is something to behold - almost Lovecraft and Hardy, what a dangerous double act - “why don’t you do something to HAUNT me?”

My sister and I pop into the bricks and mortar bookshop of Thame to see their finely preserved puffing which was apparently a star of The Repair Shop . I am jovial as ever when I bound into the bookshop. One of the booksellers eyes me suspiciously, the other other is very friendly.

Ah, the old good bibliophile bad bibliophile psychological hustle.

I buy a big art book in the Oxfam Bookshop based around Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Maybe there are enough pictures for me to finally read it.

Publication day ends at Hungerford Bookshop, this time in the town hall rather than the parish hall, probably a good thing as ;last time the Brownies overran with their knot making workshop.

Current reading

Monumenta by Lara Haworth

The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy by Barry Took and Marty Feldman

Written while listening to

Pinky’s Dream by David Lynch

Vertigo by Bernard Herrman

Robin’s next tour dates are here and you can buy a signed copy of his new book here.