Back Again

Well, that was fun. To some of you it may seem as though I haven't been doing much. To some of you it may seem as though I never do much.
This is not true, well it's partially true, I haven't won the queen's award for industry yet (and this is the book trade, we're not short of queens)!
In the last few months I have been selling books, attempting to amass the best collection of Polidori's "The Vampyre" that the world will never see, trying to memorise small, charming rural bookshops so that they will still exist somewhere, even if just inside my crowded little head, and trying to distract my wife from the fact that she doesn't have a garden, or a puppy or even a house yet (the other day I told her I had a surprise for her and she immediately said: "Is there a baby sea-lion in the bathroom? I was left lamely offering risotto, which she likes, just not as much as baby sealions).

I attended the New York Antiquarian Book Fair which was gorgeous, laden and creaking with good books and enthusiastic collectors and really nice gawkers, I met Yoko Ono (which was odd, but strangely fun). I sold a really nice bit of Bram Stoker to two of the nicest people I've ever sold Stoker to and I went to an incredibly posh party where I watched a man wearing a suit that cost more than my whole life lick hors d'oeuvres when no-one was looking and then replace them on the trays with a secret smirk of pure glee.

Apropos of nothing:

On the second day of the fair a very beautiful young woman with a sad face that could only really be accurately portrayed by an extremely gay renaissance painter came up to me and asked if she could sit down on our stand.
I of course said yes and, in the manner of a Victorian explorer's valet (which I had been practising, only to find that I lamentably lack gravitas) asked if I could be of any assistance. She replied that I couldn't help, although it was very kind of me to ask, she was only sitting there because it gave her a good view of the beautiful young man on the stand across the way whom she suspected she had fallen in love with and she needed a little while to build up the courage to go speak to him.
I resisted the urge to blubber uncontrollably like the mealy-mouthed coward in a public school novel and simply assured her she could sit there as long as she liked. When I turned around fifteen minutes later, she had gone.

I thought about her and her potential romance (which was already more romantic in my head than reality can usually attain) on and off for the rest of the day.

The next evening as I was leaving the fair in a small but persistent shower of New York rain she was standing outside the front doors, underneath an umbrella, holding a flower. She saw me and smiled with what, to my untrained eye, appeared to be just enough happiness to scorch my retinas and knock twenty years off my age.
"So that went well then?" I said as I walked past.
"Oh, yes." She said, paused, and then repeated with a slow nod.
"Oh, yes."
I continued towards my gin and tonic, she waited in the rain. The world was a better place for both of us.