This is the Behemoth, a soul-eating radiogram. It gurgles and snarls on its mantle-piece in the shop and occasionally picks up Radio 3 or a small child. It has always been here, and probably always will be. The shop itself has been hewn out of the very web it wove about itself in the primordial swamp of unconscious existence. Or Dorset, as the natives call it.
Its manifold voices, those of the damned and other light entertainers, baffle the air with their whispered demands – I’ll have an E please Bob – and coil in the dusty beams of bookshop half-light, echoing like disdaining bells calling the unfaithful to prayer.
I’ve had too much coffee today and I don’t want to do my paperwork.
Wild & Homeless Books 