The Bookshop on the Corner

by Jenny Colgan

Hospital time doesn’t move like other time. It’s a hell of a lot slower, for one thing. It doesn’t stop at night. And there is always that slight sense of wonder at everything that is going on, for all the real dramas most of us will know—loss and new life, happiness and the deepest mourning—are happening all around, on every floor of a sterile, overheated building, terror and pain and joy in every clipped professional footstep on highly polished linoleum.

I find it hard to read in a hospital; it is like being in a great ship pushing through difficult waters, while outside are people on land, walking about and carrying on with normal lives, oblivious to the choppy waters being navigated so very close to them. Poetry works well in a hospital, I find. Short things, from which you can look up and feel not quite so fragile, not quite so disconnected; for we are all there, or have been, or will be.

Nina really loved wet and cold winter days;