Blog - Medway, She Wrote

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
Terry Pratchett, ‘Guards! Guards!’

In a small, terraced house in Medway, there is a spare bedroom full of books. There’s also a bed and a chest of drawers in the room, a cupboard, and an old Victorian fireplace. But the books take up most of the space and they’re everywhere. Not in a gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling-shelves, fairy-tale-library kind of way, but in a boxes-upon-boxes-of-books-amassed-over-many-years way. There are books in cardboard boxes under the bed, in the drawers in the chest, on top of the cupboard and in plastic crates on the floor. If you stood in the limited amount of empty floorspace in the middle of this room and looked around, you’d think that whoever lives here is either a wannabe librarian, or someone with a serious book-hoarding problem.

Well, one of the people living in the house is me, and it’s my lifelong love of reading that has led to the creation of this booky black hole.

“You’ll like Gillingham. It’s a lot like Gateshead.”

The year was 2005-ish. I had just finished university, where I met my now-husband. I’d left my hometown of Gateshead to move in with him, and we were discussing where we were going to live.

My husband is a man of Kent. Specifically, a man born and raised in the Medway towns. I knew very little about Medway before I met him. In fact, it’s fair to say that I didn’t know much about the South East past London before then. I knew Kent was known as ‘the garden of England’, home of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett and green fields dotted with oasthouses. But Medway? I’d never heard of it.

He was trying to sell me Gillingham as being like a home from home, I think possibly on the basis that Gillingham and Gateshead both have lots of Victorian terraced houses. I wasn’t fooled though; I knew the real reason he wanted to move to Gillingham was to be within walking distance of a certain Priestfield Stadium, home of his beloved football team. But, for solid pragmatic reasons (we both had jobs in London that we needed to commute to by train) and more importantly because I love him, I agreed to move down South. It was a leap of faith, and a geographic leap of about 303 miles from postcode NE10 to ME7.

So we moved in together in the mid-noughties, a young (then) lass from Gateshead and a man of Kent. We lived then, and continue to live now, in a tiny, ramshackle house in Gillingham.

Medway, She Wrote

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From NE10 to ME7