Saturday commute li: An amiable route to a man's heart

          I rose about 8 o'clock,

          having first rogered my

          wife. I read a little

          in my commonplace book.

          I said my prayers and

          drank chocolate for

          breakast.

       

At Westover, down any number of tributaries of to the James River from here, William Byrd operated 180,000 acres without so much as a tractor. Still, life was OK for a guy in 1711, if he kept at it. Nowadays, of course, we can't get the help we used to have, and a lot of us are scaling back. Happily, this leaves more time for reading.


The competent wine merchant has tasted his wines, and has visited the estates where they come from; he has dined well and read broadly since his childhood, and has attended not just the cinema and the theatre, but the ballet, the symphony, and the whelping of his litters. The good tailor has done all of the above, and knew your uncle or your father, before you. These labours now qualify a man to be an accountant for a fine bookshop. The bookseller will know you. My route to the bookshop whose Christmas cracker is quoted, here, dates back to my father's headmaster at school, but is 'handed down' to me by the booksellers who are there today. 

A guy needs to know where he can go for his refreshment, and he needs that place to be there to welcome him. Layers upon layers of the gift for teaching infuse this shop as they did at two others, for me, in San Francisco, both of which were close with this one. The unannounced hun-ger, walking in the door, is the rea-son they are there; and if it were up to me to mark a year with gratitude, I'd thank my readers by saying, pick up the telephone. Give them a call. Of course you can order on line, but you'll want to talk, and you will be very glad you did. Now your curiosity surfaces - it is yours, it is fun, it goes way back, and it is is very pretty.

Heywood Hill can be reached by dialing country code 44 and then 20-7629-0647. If you are already in England, press 0 and then the number.

John Julius Norwich

  William Byrd, 9 Sept 1711

Heywood Hill, 2011

          
ii, v, vi, vii  Derek