Distracted By An Equal Music

It’s a large store. The walls are brightly coloured in red and yellow, forcing a cheerfulness on the room. The salesmen wear similar colours and walk around, looking uncomfortably happy – to make up for incompetence, I tell myself. The huge first floor has books and music on one side and stationary on the other side. This isn’t a book store, I think to myself. There is an annoying quality in the atmosphere here. Perhaps it has something to do with the disturbingly bright colours everywhere. I also can’t help but think that there is something fundamentally wrong with playing music that loud in a bookstore. I walk on anyway.

I pick up a book here and there even though it’s not the one I am looking for. I love the feel of a new book. Maybe it’s something about the smell of paper. My hands run over exotic parts of the world – Arabia, Nazi Germany and an unnamed part of an unidentified ocean – before I find the book I’m looking for. Unable to wait, I sit down and start to read. In seconds, I’m lost. A song I don’t recognise anyway fades away and I feel like it is me walking through that park in London as Michael Holmes.

The song playing in the store changes. This time, it is one I recognise and it pulls me out of my book. Frustrated by my own inability to concentrate, I try to read on, but can’t. Irritated, I give in. There is something fundamentally wrong with playing music this loud in a bookstore, I repeat to myself. But I close my book, tap my feet to the familiar song, and hum all the way home.