A Friday in Antwerpen

Sadly, despite good intentions, I will admit that there was a book-buying incident while I was out on the New Zealand, Canadian, American Tri-nation Antwerpen Outing today.
I blame Alison mostly ... until now I had imagined that the long shelves of A-Z fiction in English held the entire fiction collection at de Slegte but no ... there is a premium selection just across the aisle, a place I had never explored.
However Alison didn't limit herself to my self-defined boundaries ... she ranged far and wide, upstairs to the art and photography sections with Shannon and downstairs to my beloved travel book section. I survived. I put back a Robyn Davidson's 'Desert Places' with only the standard minor suffering.
It was The 8.55 to Baghdad that was my undoing ... it seems so promising.

Andrew Eames wrote this about his book. It begins, in 1928 Agatha Christie set out on a whim on what seems, today, a highly unlikely journey, but one which was to completely change her life. It was an eight-day trip from London to Baghdad by two aristocratic luxury trains, with black tie waiters all the way.
In the last days of peace before the Iraqi war I set out to re-trace this little known adventure in the life of Britain's best-selling author. I quickly realised that London to Baghdad, by train, is one of those journeys which has defied the modern era by becoming far harder, and longer, than it was 75 years ago. My motley selection of eight ramshackle sleepers and local expresses took two days more than Agatha's Wagon-Lits, and from Venice onwards there was no glimpse of a folded napkin, let alone a glass of chilled Bordeaux. The ultimate indignity was the mandatory AIDS test on the Iraqi border.

I had to smile as I paid for the book ... in keeping with the illicit nature of my book-buying escapades in these days of waiting for legal permission to work, the guy at de Slegte wrapped it in plain brown paper ... just like an alcoholic with her bottle 'hidden' in a brown paper bag.