Stereotyping drivers and buying books

Son Number Two and I drove into town this morning to buy trousers for him and books for me. We whiled away the journey by listening to music and playing 'Who's driving that car?' a made-up game that defames and stereotypes fellow drivers. The idiot in a Mercedes, who was needlessly hassling drivers and breaking the speed limit was, we decided, listening to Muse as he drove and ate at a very expensive sushi restaurant last night. He then spent the evening watching a pretentious film that he didn't understand. We thought he was probably a 30-something sales rep who was a bit of a plonker. The angry-looking girl coming the other way in a yellow mini was, we thought, listening to Lily Allen, had just split up with her boyfriend and thought all men were bastards. 

The Holiday Book has been bought. It's The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng and is set in 1939 Penang. It's not actually that long, at a mere 503 pages, so I bought another couple of books to make up the shortfall. This may break Holiday Book-buying rules, but rules are there to be broken and all that...

One of the other books I bought was Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. 'Who is this for?' demanded the rather nice, Jack Black lookalike who served me. 'Me,' I confessed, wondering if I was going to get a reminder that it was a children's book. But no, with a look of rapture on his face, he told me the book was 'like all the best fairy tales you've ever read, rolled into one, with added magic'. When he added that all the descriptive bits gave some people headaches, I was determined not to be one of those people. Then he said, 'Let's see what discount we can sort out here.' By then, I had already mentally divorced The Husband and become a bookseller-stalker, especially when he gave it to me half price. The book, that is. 

I started reading Howl's Moving Castle while Son Number Two was trying on jeans in Next. It starts: 'Chapter One, in which Sophie talks to hats,' so I think I'm going to like it.