Pop culture seems to be taking over the world and that doesn’t feel like a good thing. There’s a horrible irony there for me as I’ve always been pretty much a pop kinda guy. But then only in context, only as part of a much broader culture that involves many other things. Pop has become so vast that it now dictates the values of so much else.

I walked into Waterstones the other day to find it has been redesigned more in keeping with Woolworths than the serious bookstore it once was. The suggestion of gravitas using deep red with dark wood has been replaced with bright and light. Intellectual has been done over by trash. Books are now stacked in a Top 20 like popular music, their value presumably measured by number of sales.

Everything is pitched now to the biggest market even if that means the lowest common quality. "Sell ‘em cheap, stack ‘em high" is the Wal-Mart philosophy gradually pervading every field of life. Where might all that end?

TEN YEARS ON

To answer my question: after a string of failed corporate manoeuvres Waterstones survives currently in the hands of a fund manager owned by a Russian oligarch, a virtual vanity project. Woolworths is dead.