It’s so easy to invent a new life for yourself, staring into the nothingness of 2.25am. What if I weren’t here, stressed about not sleeping, worrying over bills and money or jobs and friends? Why, surely I wouldn’t be anywhere else, worrying over the same things under different sheets.
It’s popular to run away to another dimension in these fantasies. So here, it is 9am, and I run an imaginary bookshop in a small village or town or a friendly city with rents low enough I can afford to do so. The walls are painted yellow with climbing ivy inside, the books stocked full and shining on the shelves. The sunlight streams in through the shopfront, and it is perpetual spring on my walk to work.
I have regulars, Mr. Ornison, who likes to come in and look at our history books but knows so much about the small town we find ourselves in he should write one himself. He’s quietly and hopelessly in love with Gloria, who runs the local cafe, dyes her hair a flamboyant ginger shade, and has a love for floating scarves. There are new mothers with wildly well-behaved children, a sleeping baby in a sling and a remarkably literate toddler who will pick a new book every Saturday morning as though it is a grave and important task. There is the hopeless romantic, Vanessa, who gave up her big city job because she missed farm life too much and thinks reading to the cows makes them better milkers. Darren, the handyman, comes in between jobs, and if they ever run into each other in the same aisle all conversation stops and becomes blushes and stammers.
Nobody has any reason for theft or deceit here; you’re not the main character, as the bookshop owner, so you don’t have to do anything so gauche as to look for meaning in your own life. All you do is show up every day with your hair in twin plaits and a gentle smile, plus an unerring talent to pick out the book that would be perfect for the person in need of a story.
You can change this up with a chocolate shop or a bakery, depending on which chick-lit book you’ve stumbled into. (chick-lit is a distinct and separate variation on a romance novel, where the focus is liable to be more on the self or friendships and does not automatically mean the main character/s will end up with a man at the end.) But it’s so soothing, to live somewhere where it never rains except to advance the plot and the problems everyone has will be sorted out in one way or another - rehab, a surprise inheritance, a divorce - by the end of the book.
It probably says a lot about me that a comfort daydream is me being a side character, but I’m sure a lot of people feel like that at the moment - like they could happily put their current grim lockdown life on hold for a pleasant, unchallenging few months inside a book.
Honestly, I’m super tired of living through unprecedented events. Could you imagine writing a YA book with a Gen Z main character right now? ‘You have to do this or the world will end!’ ‘Yeah, sure, what else is new?’
Links
Covid-19: The secret life of museums during lockdown | BBC
I know a lot of people who will be really into this. Museums are such strange places - not liminal, exactly, but with an odd energy. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people working inside them right now.
Ultimate Comfort Reads for Hard Times | Bookshop.org
Selected by Marian Keyes, here’s a list of books that are easy to read during the pandemic. It’s been a bloody nightmare for me to get into any book, basically, that I’ve not read before during the past few months - so thanks!
'WandaVision' and the history of sitcom costume design | Daily Dot
I once took a class on the history of the sitcom. (I wanted to take one about American pop culture in literature, but that was dropped from the syllabus a week before it was meant to begin.) These videos are smart and if you like design and clothes, you’ll enjoy them!