Today I set off on another futile quest to find some stock for my business, driving 135 miles to a meeting that lasted for five minutes. The address sounded promising enough and I envisaged a vast industrial estate. Instead, I arrived here:
I've no idea why this building is on stilts, at such a precarious angle. Perhaps I should have asked.
I was met by a woman with a very territorial dog, who showed me a pitiful selection of books. I tried to seem enthusiastic, but I think she could tell that my heart wasn't in it. I got back in the car and drove past a sign that read "POLISH CAMP. PRIVATE. KEEP OUT." Then my satnav died.
After driving aimlessly for a few miles, I pulled over and stopped the car. I had no idea where I was, except that I was somewhere in Bedfordshire.
I've never really liked Bedfordshire. The countryside is generally flat and dull and its two main towns - Luton and Bedford - are twinned with Hell and Purgatory. However I was impressed that somewhere which had seemed over-developed and urbanised could still contain so many miles of remote, slightly menacing countryside.
With a growing sense of desperation, I fiddled with the power lead of my satnav until it suddenly sprang into life, telling me I was nowhere. Was this a fault or an upgrade? I turned the engine on and started driving.
Just as I was thinking horrible thoughts about Bedfordshire, I passed through a town that actually looked quite pleasant:
I was in Olney, a place I had never heard of. Most of the buildings were pre-20th century and had been made out of this attractive local stone:
I parked the car and discovered a very likeable town, full of quirky, unusual buildings, hidden courtyards and little touches of civic pride that revealed a lot about its inhabitants. I didn't see a single piece of graffiti. Bedfordshire had redeemed itself.
Then I discovered that I was in Buckinghamshire.
The one thing that spoiled Olney was the traffic. The A509 cuts right through the heart of the town and the buildings shake as juggernauts hurtle past. Looking at Olney on Google Earth, I can see that the town is surrounded by flat fields of no particular merit, so perhaps this is one of those rare occasions when a bypass is justified.
After Olney, I made a slight detour to Bletchley Park, home of the World War Two codebreakers:
I'd always thought that Bletchley Park was a remote country house. It probably was once, but since the War it has been slowly enveloped by the urban sprawl of Milton Keynes - a new town with an impressive number of roundabouts. The entrance to Bletchley Park is now opposite a large office building with blackened windows.
The actual museum of Bletchley Park is a rather disparate collection of exhibitions, mainly housed in outbuildings. Some of the exhibits are fascinating, whilst others have a more specialist appeal (I'm afraid that I have a limited interest in the use of pigeons for espionage).
But whether you're interested in the subject or not - and I have to admit that there are only so many encryption machines that I want to see in an afternoon - it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer ingenuity of the codebreakers. The dazzling complexity of these machines made my head hurt:
A very earnest man tried to explain how these machines worked and I nodded and smiled knowingly, hoping that I'd be able to sneak off before he realised that I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. I think the gist of what he was saying was about how these machines took a code that had 128 trillion possible permutations and reduced it down to a more manageable number of alternatives. Thousands, possibly millions of lives were saved as a result.
Before I finished my visit, I had to see the ultimate codebreaking machine: Alan Turing's Colossus computer:
I left feeling inspired and very humbled. I thought I was reasonably intelligent, but if I'd been responsible for breaking the Enigma code, we would have probably still been at war in 1952.
As much as I enjoyed Bletchley Park, I think I'll have a break from visiting remote industrial estates for the time being.
This morning I set off on a 140-mile journey, for a meeting that I knew was probably going to be a complete waste of time.
It was my fault. I'd approached a recycling company to see if they had any books that they'd like to sell and this prompted an exchange of emails with someone who clearly wasn't terribly proficient in the English language. He seemed very keen to meet, but each new reply convinced me that he hadn't quite understood where I was, what I did or what it was I wanted.
Perhaps I should have cancelled. But it goes against the grain to turn down any opportunity, however slim. In the end, with a heavy heart, I emailed to say that I would visit them this morning.
The journey was straightforward enough until I arrived at the town and wasted half an hour looking for an unmarked industrial estate.The recycling company occupied a building which looked like a tertiary college that had been abandoned after a nuclear accident, with long, unlit corridors and vast walls of peeling paint. It would have made a good headquarters for the warlord of a small, local militia.
The meeting was farcical. After a brief chat in an office, we walked over to a warehouse where they proudly showed me rows of paperbacks. Although I had clearly mentioned - several times - that I was interested in buying old books, they seemed to be under the impression that I wanted to run their business selling modern paperbacks. I didn't know what to say.
I tried to politely suggest that this wasn't a good idea, as I lived 140 miles away. Also, as I specialised in older books, I really wasn't the right man for the job. We looked at each other. I could sense that it wasn't going well.
We returned to the office and I was invited to sit down, but instead of talking to me, my host started filing papers and feeding invoices into a machine. Were any of these forms pertinent to our meeting, or had it simply come to an end? Perhaps it was a cultural difference. I wasn't sure.
I decided to make one last-ditch attempt to redeem myself: "If you're throwing these books into a bin and selling them as waste paper, wouldn't it be better to separate them and sell them to me for a lot more money than you're getting now?" There was a long silence, punctuated with more shuffling and filing of invoices. It was time to leave.
It could have been a rather disheartening experience, but luckily I had a contingency plan in place:
The village of Avebury, surrounded by a mysterious 6,000-year-old stone circle, was only eight miles away. My journey needn't be a wasted one.
This stone almost looks like two faces. Perhaps that's why a woman with badly-hennared hair and a floaty skirt was placing her hands on the surface.
20 years ago, it was a lot worse. All sorts of people - mostly foreign - were hugging the stones and talking about "feeling the energy". Today, people were content to touch the stones with outstretched arms, rather like a polite handshake between strangers.
Between two large stones, an earnest-looking woman addressed a small group, talking about a 'stargate'. At the back, two middle-aged men sniggered like naughty schoolboys: "On no, not the Stargate!" We exchanged knowing smiles.
I walked around the edge of the village, avoiding the tree-huggers and seekers of ancient wisdom. It was now one o'clock in the afternoon and the sheep sought shelter from the glare of the sun:
I followed the stones until I found myself in the centre of the village. Avebury seemed almost impossibly idyllic, but when I heard the plummy accents of the local shop assistants, I wondered if it had become one of those 'heritage' areas where inflated property prices had driven out the real villagers.
Avebury Manor was splendid and reminded me of the late-1970s children television drama 'Children of the Stones', which was filmed in the village. I watched it on DVD a few years ago and if anything, found it even more impressive as an adult. The intelligent script, which didn't make any compromises for a younger audience, has never been surpassed by anything on children's television:
Also, it had a wonderfully spooky intro sequence:
The quest to explain the stones, either in an archeological or supernatural context, seems futile. We will probably never know their purpose and while it is fine to speculate, I'm perfectly happy to accept the stones on their own terms. They are extraordinary, beautiful and mysterious.
I returned to my car and began the long, dull journey back to Lewes, but just as I thought I'd left Avebury behind me, I saw this:
Had they been there an hour earlier? I really wasn't sure.
I have more meetings lined up. Earlier in the year, I went into partnership with a man who ran several internet bookselling companies and it looked as if I would have a steady supply of stock of old books. However, he has decided to concentrate on his main business and after an amicable separation, I am back where I started.
At the moment I am working alone. If we can ever get our oldest son back to school, my wife will join me. I don't know if our bookselling venture will ever amount to a decent living, but I am quietly hopeful.
I intend to spend the summer finding new sources of stock, trawling the industrial estates of England. However, I suspect that there may also be some interesting detours as well, possibly with a few overnight stays.
I have recently been decluttering at a rate that would give Michael Landy a run for his money. Some of it is an attempt to bring order to a life that feels increasingly chaotic, but I'm also increasingly aware that many of my possessions are neither beautiful or useful.
I have been particularly brutal with my books, but I have no regrets. I spent the first ten years of my bookselling career gratefully accepting every proof copy that came my way, but only read a handful. The remainder - a collection of novels that were described by their publisher as 'lyrical' - served as a salutory reminder of the fate that awaits most first-time authors.
(Bloomsbury used to be very good at taking a punt on a new or unknown author and I read two proofs of novels that I was certain would be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Both failed miserably and a year later, one of the authors committed suicide)
After a few days, I had boxes full of books and ephemera - ready for the charity shops of Lewes. I also had a dozen bin bags to take to the dump, several of which rattled with video tapes. However, there was one conspicuous absence: cassettes.
For me, a TDK C-90 cassette is the equivalent of Proust's madeleines. The one at the top, with its Compact Cassette logo, the enigmatic promise of Normal Bias and the boxes to tick for noise reduction, evokes a lost world of 'radio cassette recorders', 'solid state' microphones and 'Dolby'.
As an adolescent, I was obsessed with audio cassettes. Being able to tape programmes and songs was wonderful, but the real miracle was having the freedom to make my own recordings. Sadly, my parents didn't share my enthusiasm and regarded cassettes as an unnecessary luxury. As a result, I often had to tape over beloved recordings.
Occasionally my parents would relent and return from Kingston market with cassettes made by companies with names like Bentronic or Wangui - five for a pound. Sadly, they would always produce recordings that sounded as if they had been made underwater.
After a brush with the charlatans, I insisted that my cassettes had to be either TDK or BASF (whose chrome tapes were superior to the superferric, but were alleged to wear away the tape heads).
Judging by the number of Boots C-60s in my collection, I wasn't entirely successful.
My parents were baffled by my obsession with blank cassette tapes, but what they failed to see was that each one offered the potential to make the interior world more tangible. If I play one of my old C-90s now, I can hear an aural montage of the things that preoccupied me as a teenager.
Quite why I wanted to record the switchover of Radio Four from medium to long wave is beyond me. I also wonder why I taped the theme tune of David Bellamy's Australian wildlife series 'Up a Gum Tree'. But the beauty of these recordings is that they manage to evoke the past far more potently than any photograph.
In a recording of a BBC programme - made by placing a microphone in front of a television - my parents' telephone rings, our dog barks and somebody rings the doorbell. I remember being infuriated, but today, it is these extraneous noises that make the recording so evocative.
When I searched through my drawer of cassettes, I found comedy tapes that I'd recorded with friends, attempts at 'radiophonic' sound effects, embarrassing teenage conversations about the meaning of life and some music I'd written for fringe plays. I couldn't throw them away.
After deciding that I had to keep my tapes, I realised that I had nothing to play them on.
£20 later, a new Walkman arrived in the post and I started sorting through my tape collection. Revisiting the past is always a bittersweet experience, but these days I feel kinder towards my adolescent self.
At one point, when I heard an impression of Pope John Paul II that I'd spent weeks perfecting, I even laughed.
