Purely anecdotes and musings - you've been warned

"I am looking for a book," she would say. "You're in a bookshop, so there's no need to announce it," I would not say. "The cover is white and it was over there last week," one hand circling the shop. Or, "It's about a boy and his mother, and she dies, and so he must go on a journey that will prove the strength of his will." "Bambi!" I would almost say.

Something about working in a bookshop convinces you that you are smarter than those you serve. (You know the kind - the Philosophy major, who reads Nietzsche behind the counter (wherein is tucked a copy of the latest tacky thriller), with one eyebrow permanently raised above the rim of his glasses and his lips pursed.) But something about shopping in a bookshop convinces you that are smarter than those who serve you. (Hence the stereotyped description above - in two years I never worked with one of those.)

A bookshop is a battle of psyches and some inappropriate, redirected rage, with author's names for ammunition and books lining the walls for atmosphere. A little too much? Ok, I grant you that. The books don't just line the walls; they are arranged inside the room on bookshelves and piles on the floor. One more? They are the pretence for opening the battle field to the public.

Ok, I think this bantering is out of my system (remember that I was a bookseller and am a bookbuyer and that books are my religion. And hence awarded certain liberties).

The premise is, however, sadly true. Imagine this at 15.00 on a Saturday afternoon in one of the busiest malls in the country when you have been standing since 08.00 and the aircon is broken and one of the other staff is off sick: One moron customer instructing you not very nicely about how to press 'tab' to get to the next field, because he is in a hurry. (Now remember that as a feminist, I am very prickly about men treating me as though I am stupid.) Rage. Pure rage.

Or the woman who asked if I liked to read and then recommended I read Dan Brown. (I'm sorry if that offends any Brown fan (but not really). I'm sure his books are great 'sorbet' reads - reads that have no function except to cleanse your emotional scars before the next book - and paperweights, but they are not going to dance with the orbit on which I wobble.) So take your paperweight and leave said orbit.

These sound trivial, but they are the incidents I remember. Like the two women I served as a waitress one day, who were really nice even though I fudged their really simple order and told me I looked like Julianne Moore, and didn't leave a great tip (the last few rands were counted out in bronze coins), but who I remember 9 years later for being really genuinely nice when I was tired and my calves ached and I felt like I looked like Golem and I was really really lost.

What prompted this ramble was a bookbuying expedition. I stood in the amorphous queue (the one with no people in but the spot at which one of the sellers was looking at the time) clutching my tome to my chest. I do not just buy. I plan, forage, identify, continue to forage, identify more, compare, contemplate and usually decide I don't need said item after all, because homeless children wander my street without such things.

Buying tomes is clearly a big event for me. (Pun...)

This seller continued to look at the spot in which I was standing and perspiring with some vague idea that a security guard would stop me and tell me to stop being frivolous. One second, two seconds, three... The snotty-nosed boy then looked at me, arched his eyebrow above his glasses and put the book he had been reading on the counter. He turned and walked away.

Another girl rushed up to the next counter and beckoned me on. She kept looking at his back, not reprovingly, but adoringly, probably because he is a Philosophy major and speaks Latin or ancient Greek or something. So I got my tome and she served a customer without once looking at her (an achievement) and he is still a prat.

There's no great revelation here, if that's what you're looking for. Just a woman musing out loud (musing out binary silence... screen buzzing... key tapping...?) and concluding: that most social interactions - brief and anonymous, or enduring and intimate - are battlefields; that at different times we fill different roles - prat, admirer, tome-buyer; and that maybe the roles you fill or have filled, shift in hindsight.

And maybe I just lost my touch with the grand-sounding ending - The Point you love so much. Bear with me. I'm sure I'll be able to dredge it up again.