I have reluctantly joined Threads, to add another account to the list of social media platforms I barely understand how to use effectively. If you use it, and want to watch me flail, you can.

I was out in Elephant and Castle last night. I was in fact on my way to a party, but I was waylaid, dear reader, because I came across a bookshop. A bookshop that was still open at 7pm – a bookshop, therefore, that I had to go and poke my nose into.

It was The Book Elephant. It’s a nice little bookshop. It has books, and it has book-related stuff, and it has a little café. It wasn’t busy. It was a cold evening outside, but the lights were warm. And it had chairs, and tables, and so I sat down for a little while and read.

Which is something that you can’t always do in a bookshop, because as much as being surrounded by books is lovely you are also in a shop, and that provides a certain capitalistic pressure to be there for the purpose of buying something. A library has places to sit and read, because that’s the whole point; a bookshop, especially chains like Waterstones, often don’t, because they want you to focus on the shop part. (Or if it’s one of the tiny second-hand bookshops I love so much, where the tomes are stacked ceiling-high and wall-to-wall, there’s no space to sit down.) At least that’s how I’ve often felt, in places like this: I can relax in a bookshop, I can spend hours wandering around and looking at books, but there is always that pressure at the back of my mind. Also, unlike a library, if you take a book off the shelf and just start reading it then somebody is going to ask you to pay, which is both reasonable and less conducive to sitting down and relaxing.

But not here. I had my own book, and I wanted to get a few more pages in before the party, to decompress after a day of work and before throwing myself back into a very social situation. And I did. And I felt myself at the most relaxed I’ve been in a bookshop for a long time; it was warm, and comfortable, and quiet, and smelled of paper, and there is little better.

Because despite the fact that I love books and writing in all their forms, I don’t always feel good in a bookshop, or a library. I get, quite frequently, really anxious there. Because words have weight, and I am surrounded by them, and I feel from all sides the imagined spectres of hundreds of authors finding me wanting, for I am not among them. There is a slot at the end of the S section where I would like very much to see my name on a spine, and it is not there. It may never be there. But there are other names there, so many of them, and they have succeeded, their words are here, and mine are not, and after a few minutes of getting my ego kicked in by my own brain I have to step outside. It’s not fun, I’ll tell you that.

Not here, though. I didn’t feel that at Book Elephant. I even looked at their shelves and realised that, if I were represented here, I’d be next to Adrian Tchaikovsky, and that would in fact be pretty cool. I didn’t feel anxious. I didn’t feel any of those above-mentioned pressures. I had a good book in my hands, and I could sit and read it, and all was right with the world.

(And I even got my wife part of her Christmas present into the bargain, so that was handy.)