World Book Day

Read in the papers today that some book company is celebrating World Book Day, but it didn't state the date of the supposed World Book Day.

Anyway, it got me reminiscing. I do not know whether anyone out there remembers the famed Jaya Supermarket at Section 14, there used to be an MPH on the first floor and Katy's Toys used to be on the second floor, if I remember correctly; and this was years, years ago when I was 8 or 9 years old that would be in 1980-1981.

Every Sunday (or Saturday) was spent at Jaya Supermarket because Cold Storage was there and that's where the family did the weekly grocery shoppoing/marketing. Of course this was preceeded by a walk on all floors, walking ambly through Katy's Toys which I never bought anything because I was not into toys, then down to MPH. I was my recurring fantasy that I would one day get locked up inside MPH when the stores have all closed and my family had suprisingly forgotten about me. Fantasy! How I wanted to stay in that bookshop!

My favourite read, while standing, in that bookshop was TinTin, Asterix not so much. But the books I always bought (meaning my mother buying, of course) was The Famous Five. By the time I was 8, I had finished all the series of Secret Seven, Famous Five and Hardy Boys. By 9, I had started on Agatha Christie, greedily consuming Hercule Poirot and Ms Marple. I was never one for Mills & Boons junk or those Sweet Valley High rubbish.

I gradually went on to having my own National Geographic subscription in my early teens, in college I started on Somerset Maugham (my favourite still), then scouring the second-hand bookshops for him and Herman Melville because it's kind of difficult getting your hands on their books. My particular interest is books printed and bound in the 1950's as they come thread-bound (not all, but you can find them, again, in second-hand dusty, cramped, asthma-inducing shops). It's strange that it was only in my late twenties that I read the classics.