My dream bookshop has the shelves on wheels so I can push them out of the way behind some blackout curtains to turn the place into a gallery or black box theatre. It also has Lisa Loeb at the cash. And she basically just sings to me all day while I ignore the six customers who come in. God, I need to cultivate more relationships with aged, heirless rich folk.

As a ready cure for boredom, I like to daydream about the bookshop I am going to own in a pleasant Georgian block on a pedestrianised street somewhere in central London. Maybe in Hackney, or better still in Soho, Cecil Court. Perhaps Clerkenwell Green would be right – or better still just off Brick Lane near that house where Gilbert and George live.

In my bookshop, all hardbacks will retail at £4 and all paperbacks at £2. Obviously, I will also stock incredibly expensive rare first editions. These fine books will rest in a separate room at the back of the shop where I shall sit behind my gargantuan oak desk reading modernist fiction and drinking brandy from a silver, inscribed hipflask. That – briefly – is my dream bookshop.

Obviously I know this bookshop is never going to actually materialise. But just to imagine it is enough for me. Luckily, there are people in the world who possess the knowhow and get-up-and-go to turn such dreams into a potentially working reality. I say potentially because it is getting harder and harder to open such an establishment.