Suffering on the train home this morning, I tried to will no one to sit next to me but it didn't work. No problem though because I got the best fellow passenger ever. Peter the Liverpool fireman - who reads masses of fiction and offered to share his tea with me. He told me he always had a travelling book, a home book and a work book.
'So you get to read at work?' I asked, imagining some furtive desk-reading at lunchtimes and that's when he told me what he did. Apparently they have bookshelves in the station and swop them with other stations. He even, whisper it, reads in the engine on the way to jobs sometimes.
'Do you discuss the books?' I asked.
'Yes, with my wife,' he said.
'No, I mean with the other firemen. Do you have a bookclub or anything?'
He looked at me as if I was crazy. 'We are men,' he said.
Anyway he's now got a copy of Leading the Dance for the fire station shelves, appropriately the red one!
A friend sent through these letters to God . Although I like this one:
it's Joyce here that I can really identify with:
