​Browsing in bookshops involves much more than just looking. It involves a lot of stroking and fondling of the kind that you might be arrested for if the subject of your public attentions was a person. In “The Polysyllabic Spree”, his account of a year-long reading binge, novelist Nick Hornby declared that “books are simply better than anything else” and these days, books are so darn sexy it’s hard to keep your hands off them.

​​There’s nary a corgi or a Union Jack to be seen in central Nelson at ten o’clock on the morning of the royal visit. There are hardly any people either. Although Trafalgar Street isn’t exactly Dead Man’s Gulch, it’s certainly quieter than usual. “Don’t quote me” says a shopkeeper, “but town is dead”. 

Now that we can turn day into night with a blasé flick of a light switch , we have mostly forgotten the actual, and metaphorical implications which light – and its absence – once held. But on Saturday night the procession of human beings towards the lights in Queen’s Garden suggested a rekindling of the primeval association of light with warmth, protection and wonder. 

“The Ultimate Book of Farting” is winner of the Failure of Nerve Award. The Award Committee found much to praise in the mechanism which produced a fart each time the book was opened. 

When we step off the ferry I experience a sudden sense of dislocation. It’s partly that the Boulder Bank has always been over there, and now it is Nelson that is over there. But it’s more than that. The place so obviously belongs to the birds. They are all around us, wheeling over our heads, perched on the driftwood that lies in piles like bleached bones, fossicking amongst the rocks.