Picador Day at Foyle's Bookshop

Picador Day at Foyle's in Charing Cross was my first glimpse of a legendary Foyle's store. The depth and range of specialist sections was enough to send me into paroxysms of book-lust, but as part of my attempts to source everything through my local library before parting with my hard-earned cash (which all belongs to The Student Loans Company anyway) I somehow managed not to spend.

Picador were displaying their latest and greatest in prose and poetry writers and I was most excited about seeing Jon Ronson whose Guardian articles I usually devour first. In the first talk, entitled Family and Self, Ronson, chosen because of his touchingly funny portrayals of the 'bubbles of madness' in his family life, bemoaned his decision to write about this close subject. It was obvious he felt awkwardly exploitative about his past column and is now concentration on journalism about the strangeness in places further afield, whilst still highlighting the reality that there is oddity and madness in any community, in any situation.

I'm excited about reading Abi Grant's Words Can Describe, about her part in the trials of her attacker years after his attempt to rape her. I am most looking forward to hearing from a woman who has been able to record her personal circumstances, a woman who very much refuses to allow herself to be written into our usual narratives about rape. She shucks off the title 'brave' with much irritation, refuting the flip side of that term, that women who cannot fight off their attackers are cowardly or even "asking for it". Her struggle to prove herself as victim conjured for me a passage in Deuteronomy, which says that if 'a man find (a damsel) in the city, and lie with her; Then ... ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel because she cried not, being in the city' (Deuteronomy 22:23-24). The onus is still on woman, in this day and age, to fight against the horror of rape.

The talks progressed through the day with Writing of Place, and Poetry and Beyond, an interesting discussion on how poetry and other literary forms inform each other or even subsume each other for the writer. In this discussion, as in the Family and Self discussion I fell in love with Jackie Kay, who read with humour and warmth from her new memoir Red Dust Road, about meeting her Nigerian father, and from her poetry collections, of which there are many which I am chomping at the bit to read. Kay brought interesting new perspectives to bear upon the discussions of writing practice, and the fear of the blank page. I scuttled off to the library on my lunch-break this Tuesday to withdraw her novel Trumpet, about a transgender musician and it is already in my big pile of current reading.

This week I have also loved:

• Exciting snippets from new writer Simon Lelic and not even published yet writer Naomi Wood


• My first ever pub quiz victory at The Victoria in Walthamstow - a lovely old East End boozer. Although I don't think a Welsh person can really say that phrase with much authenticity.


• Taking a two-hour detour on the way home to visit the swimming pool, feeling all fit and smug, only to find it closed


• Purple fingernails


• Little half hour windows of glorious sunshine in between the grey, rain-filled days