Travel and book shopping

My last post was a true fever dream. I just re-read it and had horrible flashbacks to how disrupted my mental wellbeing was last week. The good news is that my sleeping has settled down and now I’m just dealing with the run of the mill end of year fatigue that is binding us all together at the moment.

In November, I was lucky enough to go on two trips, both of which featured book shopping. First, my friends Sara and Clare and I went to visit Hay-on-Wye, a small town nestled on the England/Wales border and relatively easy to access from Liverpool, where we live. Hay is home to an annual literary festival, and is known for its incredible bookshops, both new and second hand. My friends and I met at book club, so had been looking forward to exploring Hay together, and making some purchases.

The village itself is easily navigated and I managed to pick up some great old and new gems. I snagged a first edition of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, and visited Hay’s newest addition, Gay-on-Wye, a gorgeous LGBT+ centred shop with wonderfully friendly owners. There, I picked up a few gems, including Mario Testino’s Men, and a fun volume called Queer Icons and their Cats.

Other highlights from Hay include eating from the local chippy two nights in a row, and having a lovely chat with a local around my age who’d moved home from a city to open a cafe. One can dream. I didn’t end up taking any photos in Hay, because I switched off from my phone a bit, but we had a wonderful time.

Then, from one extreme to another. I came back from Hay on Sunday evening and was on a flight to New York on Tuesday afternoon. New York is truly one of the world’s greatest cities. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time there with my friend Laura Ann, who is a born and bred New Yorker now living in Dublin. She and I stayed with her sister Andrea in Carroll Gardens, and in between eating everything in sight, I managed to visit the legendary Books are Magic. What a treasure trove! Like the staff at all the shops in Hay, the staff there are gorgeous, thoughtful people, who love nothing more than to recommend their favourite reads and chat books. I picked up Bobby Finger’s The Old Place there (right after seeing him at the Who? Weekly live show. A life highlight!), as well as some cute merch for my friends back home.

You don’t need me to tell you how amazing New York is, and I didn’t get to explore all of the shops I wanted to, just because my time was so limited. Enjoy this bonus pic of Andrea and I outside the gorgeous wall at BaM. And check out that cute yellow tote I picked up! What a dream.