Standing in Blackwell's Oxford browsing along the poetry shelves. Except it is not at all like the current shop. There are bare wooden floorboards, an airier feel, pale blue-grey decor. I realise that it is, in fact, the French seaside hotel in Picardy we go to once a year - Les Tourelles.

I want to buy a little City Lights volume of Sonnets - but can't identify the name on the cover. I take it to the till for gift wrapping. There's a rather precious sales assistant, he has the typical Oxford dither and mannerisms of a Bodleian librarian I vaguely remember. He's irritated by the squat format which won't fit the gift wrap sheet. He turns the book this way and that. Exasperated, I take the book and clumsily bundle it up. Then I go upstairs to pay - they're operating the old Foyles style of getting a chit.

Upstairs, the sales assistants are gorging themselves on thick slices of chocolate cake, flapjacks, jam sponges. The English bookshop cafe craze taken to an extreme. The cash point is both coffee shop and the old British Library book collection desk. It seems to be their daily routine - one endless tea party. I'm appalled at the health consequences yet tempted all the same as one assistant sinks his teeth into a wedge of cake.

(Some delayed unconscious reaction to last week's announcement about library proposals? Or darker motives ...?)