India Knight - The Shops

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India Knight was born in 1965. She lives in London with her boyfriend and three children. She is the author of two bestselling novels, My life on a Plate and Dont You Want Me?, both of which are published by Penguin.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

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Published by Viking 2003
Published with updates in Penguin Books 2004

Text Copyright India Knight, 2003, 2004
Illustrations Copyright Sam Wilson, 2003

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-141-93796-0

To Amaryllis and Afsaneh

This is not a shopping guide; its a book about shopping a sort of Joy of Sex for shops, with fewer beardy, tumescent men. Its not going to tell you to go to blissful Peter Jones although obviously you should, often to buy wool (and bamboo knitting needles, a revelation after using metal) or hosiery. Its not going to direct you to Harvey Nichols, because it assumes that you know where it is, and what its for (footballers wives. Only joking! It bee a big fancy shop in that there Lunnun). There are no great long lists of stores I think you ought to frequent, but, scattered here and there, there are incidental boxes. I am extremely pleased with these boxes. They contain gems: the very best shopping addresses I have gathered in the course of my research. Yes, Ive done shopping research imagine the hardship: the oil-rig worker, the junior doctor and me, slaving away at the coal face, bloody but unbowed.

Actually, Ive been researching this book throughout the course of my adult life, because shopping has been my hobby my vocation, almost since I was a very small child. Hence the boxes: I am sharing my shopping Good News, evangelically. You want pants thatll take two inches off your waist without (crucially) redistributing the podge on to your lower back or eeooo upper thighs? You want cream that gets rid of snog-rash? Cherry cake to swoon over? A country cottage to rent for half-term? Look in the boxes. They ought, for the most part, to be helpful wherever you live, thanks to the goodness of online shopping and mail order. It goes without saying that they are also completely and necessarily subjective: dont blame me if you order gingerbread and then dont like the taste, or if you dont share my definition of a good facial. And please dont misinterpret this book as some sort of creepy guide to gracious living buy what I buy, live like me because I am the kind of person who eats bacon sandwiches in the bath, can spend days shunning human contact in favour of Georgette Heyer, and would rather count the hairs on my head one by one than even think about amusing new ways with place setting/floral arrangements.

But I do love the shops. Oh, God, The Shops. I cant quite remember if that almost-not-daring-to-believe, kick-in-the-stomach feeling of pure joy You mean we give you a few coins and the lovely thing becomes mine? first happened when my paternal grandmother took me to a ptisserie (Vatel in Brussels, 8 rue General Leman they still do absolutely the best baguette in town), where I stood transfixed in front of a tiny tartelette au citron: pale yellow, with frilled edges and Citron written (just like that) in tall, thin, curly letters of darkest chocolate. I dont think Id quite grasped that food came from shops before (sheltered childhood, and I was only six), and this tartelette was a revelation. The idea that you could eat delicious things all the time, if you liked, simply by taking a few steps down the street and SHOPPING, was just amazing to me.

So thats where the passion started, I think either then or perhaps sometime the same year, in the giant papeterie on the rue Belliard, around the corner from my grandparents flat. A papeterie is a stationers, stupidly prosaic in English the word really deserves a better, more lyrical, more ecstatic translation. I love paper, and this is where the love began. This hushed, sober shop had, obviously, paper by the quire: thin paper, thick paper, hand-made paper, marbled paper in six shades of pink, like melting strawberry ice-cream and coloured inks, and heavy, solemn, important-feeling fountain pens, and felt tips, nibs, quills, woody pencils with rich, oily leads (mmm, graphite), rows of beautifully bound books with hopeful blank pages Wed gone to buy me some Caran dAche pencils. I remember the shops smell to this day, and the sort of swoon I fell into by the counter; I remember my grandfathers complicit smile the smile of recognition of like meeting like: he, too, was a stationery fetishist (he also taught me how to stand in bookshops, appreciatively sniffing the air before diving in this was in the days when bookshops were small and didnt smell of Starbucks).

I still spend a disproportionate amount of time in my local stationers, groping the very ordinary notebooks, sometimes quite wanting to lay my cheek on their pristine pages. I also go to artists supply shops and stand in a corner, beaming with love at the brash, jaunty tubes of acrylics, the tiny, elegant blocks of watercolour, the sable brushes and, of course, the paper. I got my eldest son his own big box of Caran dAche pencils recently, and became somewhat teary-eyed as I was buying them. One of the funny things about shopping and Ill get to this in a later chapter is that it can dredge up the most unexpected emotions, especially if youre comfort-shopping, which is to say usually shopping for some aspect of your mislaid childhood.