Of Mischief & Books

As my shelves might have clued you in, I'm a serial-reader of Diana Wynne Jones' books, I've made it a personal mission to slowly work my way through her world(s) and I'm loving every single minute of it. ;)

So on a school trip to London - all the way from France, so you have some context - while everyone else was busy shopping for clothes by day and getting drunk by night, I holed myself up inside Foyles and proceeded to worship the whole collection of DWJ books quietly in the kids' section like the happy creepy nerd I am, thinking I must be in heaven because we don't have these in France unless we either specifically order them online or make puppy eyes at the bookseller so that they get them in stock.

My boyfriend, which we'll creatively refer to as Boyfriend, is pretty accustomed to my bookish antics and that's the understatement of the year.

When I asked him the fateful question ' But which ones do I pick ? ' with a very real pout of misery, Boyfriend stoically answered :

' All of them. '

A terrible enabler, that one.

I feel both proud and spectacularly stupid to announce that I settled for only five of these beauties, namely : The Lives Of Christopher Chant, The Ogre Downstairs, Fire & Hemlock, Year Of The Griffin and Power Of Three.

And such was the story of my first (but not last) trip to Foyles. A bloody good thing too, what with the :

1. Extremely Crappy Hostel Room. I honest to god cried like a baby, wanted to puke, wanted to get drunk, all repeatedly and in no particular order, and I don't even drink alcohol ever, for god's sake (don't look at me, it smells yucky). In fact...yeah :

I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT, ROMANTICISM AND ITS QUAINT SETTING = OVERRATED.

2. Sharing a room with six (6) strangers (French and from the same group), and Boyfriend. Boyfriend not a problem, I tolerate Boyfriend on a daily basis, I do. The other French people like me with whom I was sharing the room shouldn't have been a problem either, but that's anxiety for you. People, yucky.

3. Walking all day because museum visits and cultural stuff (which is good), and being stuck outside the hostel room because one key for eight people is a mathematical hazard.

I needed all the reading I could get.

But I couldn't just stop without having given in to the guilty pleasure of capitalism, aaaaaaand Waterstone happened. Eight Days Of Luke and Enchanted Glass, welcome to the family !

Random other highlights of my London trip :

- I have a thing for bricks and rows of identical houses don't ask me I don't know okay.

- I saw the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens !!!!!!

- I found the Neverwhere Floating Market. They call it Camden Market these days, pass it on.

- Double Berry Muffins.

- 'Mind the gap' they say. I forgot to mind the gap every single time.

Were the books worth the romantically-decrepit-room-sharing-of-doom ? Yes. Absolutely. A million times yes even though I made a grand total of 0 friend. With DWJ's Reflections and her thoughts on her different books that I read beforehand, handpicking the books from the shelves and discovering through them what this glorious woman was all about...That's priceless.