RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM LONDON

The 35-foot-high spider outside the Tate Modern, shown in pic at right, is the work of 89 year old French/American artist Louise Bourgeois and was commissioned by the Tate Modern when they opened in 2000.

Now the artist has a retrospective at the Tate Modern which runs until Jan 20, 2008.

Each morning I walk to the local newsagency and buy The Independent, The Guardian and The Times. I can't do justice to them or I wouldn't be out of the huse until the afternoon but I can't resist buying them because they have first class journalists writing for them whatever the subject area.

In the Guardian this morning however is a table showing circulation for all the national newspapers and my three favoured papers are in three of the bottom four places!

Leading the way, by huge numbers, are the tabloids - The Sun with 3.2 million daily readers, The Daily Mail with 2.4 million, and The Daily Mirror on 1.6 million.

Contrast this with The Times 655,000, The Guardian 368,000, and The Independent, a distant last with 251,000.

On Sunday morning I bought the Sunday editions of the three papers, although The Guardian publishes The Observer as their Sunday paper. The three newspapers made one massive pile of paper and my arm was starting to ache by the time I carried them back to Katy & Ben's flat.

The really impressive thing from my perspective about these papers is the huge amount of space devoted to the arts, and in particular to book reviews and author interviews. In The Observer on Sunday for example there were some 16 book reviews plaus a number of major book stories including a two page long look at Doris Lessing and her work by Lietrary Editor Robert McCrum. And this comes on top of 19 book reviews in sister newspaper The Guardian the day before.

The Sunday Times ran 12 major book reviews and a host of briefly mentioneds while The Independent had 10 book reviews as well as an excerpt from Alice Sebold's latest, The Almost Moon.

Then of course there is space devoted to opera, in fact music of every kind, ballet, art & architecture, design, and theatre.It would be easy to spend the entire day reading these three excellent Sunday papers.

I notice Book People Ltd , a Belfast-based mail order outfit offering all six shortlisted Man Booker titles for pds.34.99 with the byline "Save pds.45 and judge for yourself".

Radio New Zealand National are going to cross to the Man Booker Prize Gala Dinner in London for the announcement of the winner around 10.30am Wednesday NZ time.

Tomorrow I will have been here a week. To date I have visited 27 boosktores. In fact the only other retails outlets I have been in have been a pharmacy and three supermarket visits. It would be very different if I were here with Annie, one of the world's great shoppers!

Two of the best-selling books in London presently are Jamie Oliver's At Home with Jamie and Nigella Lawson's Nigella Express so I was interested to observe in Borders today that they were selling both titles at half price. Thanks to the nice people at Penguin Books NZ I have a review copy of At Home with Jamie but I don't have Nigella Express so bought myself a copy for 12pds50 as opposed to 25 pounds. And it comes with a great Nigella Express canvas shopping bag.

Further along Oxford Street I went into Waterstones (they have two branches in Oxford St) and lo and behold they had their three top selling harbacks all at half price - these were at number one - The Guiness Book of Records 2008, Jamie at Home number two, and Michael Palin's just published New Europe at number three.

Elsewhere at half price they also had Nigella Express while another title just published and receiving a huge amount of review coverage, Eric Clapton:The Autobiography has seven pounds off the cover price of twenty pounds.

One wonders about these discount wars. The publisher and bookseller must be taking a cut in their margins and the author will be receiving a reduced royalty so who is winning? The consumer of course. You do wonder though at the need to discount books which have just been published and are clearly going to be in demand. It is hardly a highly profitable industry and the idea of discounting in this way sems ludicrous to me, even though I am a consumer.

Incidentally Oxford Street with is huge crowds is my least favourite street in London but I usually alight my bus where Oxford Street and New Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road intersect so often find myself having to walk down at least part of it. Today I was meeting old ex-pat Kiwi mates of mine, Penny and Sam, in James Street for lunch so walked almost the entire length of Oxford Street to get there. We lunched at Massis a wonderful Lebanese restaurant just around the corner from Oxford Street. Superb food. Penny & Sam are regulars there and I can understand why.

By the way the three top books on Waterstones paperback list are A Thousand Splendid Suns at number one, Atonement (film tie-in edition) by Ian McEwan, at number two, with Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother in third place. These titles are not discounted.