Sometimes I feel like I have been washed up on a familiar shoreline, on a beach whose low breakers gently push me onto the sand. I feel this way sometimes when I have spent time with my library, the vast majority of which is in my garage. It used to be a much bigger collection but moving back to a smaller house and having a larger family to accommodate made its relocation and culling essential. The core of the library remains, with a lot of plays, novels, poetry and history books apparent, amongst a motley selection from Christianity, Buddhism, Psychology and Cultural Theory.

I love to pick up and dip into a book I haven't read in 30 or 40 years, finding a kind of peace and also an abiding joy in unfolding the dry pages of memory. Little gems spring out too - a train ticket, a receipt for a chocolate bar from a now defunct confectioner, a political advertisement that I cannot remember cutting from a newspaper, all re-purposed as bookmarks.

It is not really nostalgia and I cannot give it a name. I mean, the feeling I get, like sunshine in winter through a solitary pane of glass, a warm, unsought after spot that unclutters the mind and offers solace. I don't get that same feeling from my kindle, for though it holds many wonderful books, it does not array them in all their dusty, page-worn, lop-sided glory. Books knock up along-side each other like students in an old school photo.

Oh, I do so hope that books and bookshops make a comeback one day, when the gimmickry of technology begins to bore, when people seek a more tactile immersive experience.