The inevitable has finally happened. The second hand bookshop where I used to work on Charing Cross Road has now vanished, replaced by "The Ginseng Centre." It, too, looks like it's given up the ghost. All that remains of my own small part of this once magnificent street of books is a memory. The shop was as dog-eared and musty as the books that it contained and run by an eccentric lady called Natasha.

Everyone around me seems to be dropping like flies into retirement, says Atticus, and it's making me very uncomfortable. Retirement. The hanging up of one's gloves, sword or fiddle. The ceasing of valuable occupation. The anecdotes beginning "During my time at..." The withdrawal into the garden shed. The doddery dash for hobbies and a sudden interest in bridge. It all sounds so uncompromisingly final.

I've had to retire from the literati, says Atticus. I've just been beaten by Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I struggled manfully through "the Booker of Bookers" but, three quarters in, made the innocent mistake of picking up a John Updike book, Rabbit Redux.

Last week a young friend, Euan, who reviews books for a prestigious literary journal, told me he felt ‘gagged' into giving a book a decent review because the author worked for the magazine.  He said there is a lot of ‘you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours' in the world of book reviewing, and in this sense it's a ‘closed shop.'  I've often wondered if Anna Karenina would receive a decent review these days, chortled the Countess du Ruel, if Tolstoy wasn't networking the ‘in' crowd.  The ‘in crowd' means the darlings of The Spectator, The Week, and the broadsheet supplements.  The Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard are very important.