I used to catch the bus home from tafe rather than drive, and I’d been watching the vacant shop across the road from the bus stop with great interest over the weeks, trying to guess what what was going to open there. I initially thought it might be a furniture shop, but in the end it turned out to be a bookshop, with a cafe. They seem to be all the rage here now, bookshops with cafes attached. It’s called ‘Word’, and I remember thinking that that was a pretty cool name for a bookshop.

Anyway, a friend of mine was having her birthday recently, and since I could see that the shop had little gifty-looking things, I thought I’d nick in there one night before tafe and see if they had anything good. So I walked in, and went over to a shelf which looked like it had gifts on it. There were bookmarks with Bible passages on them, and confirmation gifts etc, and I saw that I was in the religion section. So I looked for a general gift area. I walked around a bit, and found a section which had little stuffed toys, which was great, because I was looking for a little stuffed elephant. Unfortunately all the toys were attached to books, and they did have an elephant, but I didn’t think that an adult would really have much interest in the story of Noah’s Ark written for kids in a book about 5cm square. So I started to have a look around again, when I noticed that I was in what seemed to be the kids’ religion section. I thought that was weird - bookshops don’t usually have their religion section spread over two totally different parts of the shop, do they?

Next I ended up in the fiction section, still looking for a present, and I saw titles like, ‘Heavenly Inspirations’ and ‘An Act of God’, and I wondered how the hell I managed to find religion sections everywhere I went in the shop.

And then if finally dawned on me. Ohhhhhhhh, it’s THAT ‘Word’, not ‘word’ as in, books have words so what a cool name for a bookshop. Crap.