I was in Dublin today, and popped into Eason, a large and famous bookshop on the corner of O'Connell Street and Abbey Street. I looked at a few books, including The Jesus Jokebook, by Des MacHale. It's less irrevarant than it sounds, its compiler being a practising Catholic (and Professor of Mathematics). One I did buy, though, was Laura James' Tigger on the Couch.

Then, inspired by a complaint I'd read recently about a bookshop which didn't stock any Thomas Paine, I went to the customer services desk to ask what Paine they had. After I'd spelled his name for her twice, the lady found that they had Common Sense in the classics section downstairs. So I descended to the basement to search it out. It took a while, as the books were not all in alphabetical order. Most of them were, but Common Sense was with the other books in the Great Ideas series. I ended up buying it and two of its companions: Michel de Montaigne's On Friendship and George Orwell's Why I Write.

A little later, having read almost half of Why I Write over lunch, I wandered into another bookshop, Books Upstairs, opposite Trinity College, a much smaller place than Eason, with apparently only one member of staff on duty. A chap was asking him for a particular translator's version of a Greek classic, which I now forget, and he was heading upstairs to see what was in stock when he saw me hovering. Again, I asked whether they had any Thomas Paine. "We should have The Rights of Man, shouldn't we?" He said. "I'll have a look."

I hung around till he came back downstairs. "Sorry," he said. "We always have The Rights of Man, but we're out of stock at the moment."

I think I'll be going back to Books Upstairs. I had a glance there at Gunter Grass' Peeling the Onion, extracts of which I've heard on Radio 4, but it was a bit pricy.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Tigger is diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (AD/HD), Predominantly Hyperactive Impulsive Type.