Starting on 24th June, it’s Independent Bookshop week. As everyone knows my love affair with bookshops has lasted my whole life. I grew up visiting the now legendary Exchange Bookshop in Dalkey, full of pokey corners and floor to ceiling bookshelves of wonder. I cried when I found out it was closing because my first book was due out shortly afterwards and I’d never see it on those shelves. Books, and bookshops, have been so important to me.

On Saturday I’ll be teaming up with Carmel Harrington (writer extraordinaire, @HappyMrsH) to bookshop crawl up the east coast to Dublin. We’re meeting up in Wicklow at Bridge Street Books around 11am, heading for Dubray in Bray and Magpie Books in Enniskerry. Then on to the spiritual sucressor of The Exhange in Dalkey, the lovely Gutter Bookshop. After that we head for Dubray Dun Laoghaire, Blackrock, Raven Books (any others we can think of?) and on into the city centre for Chapters, Books Upstairs and Dubray on Grafton Street where we will be meeting Hazel Gaynor and Catherine Ryan Howard. They will have done their own book crawl from the west in. We’ll all collapse over coffee.

We don’t know if we’ll make all the shops and we don’t know what times we’ll be arriving at them. But we will be updating online as we go. If anyone is arround, say hi! The hashtags are #bookshopcrawl & #IBW2017

And because one event in a day isn’t enough I’ll also be taking part in Hodges Figgis Great Harry Potter Read – reading Chapter 16 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s at 4.30pm. Second last chapter, where all the action is.

And THEN I’m off to a Barbecue at the Zoo.

Can I fit all this into one day? There’s only one way to find out. Stay tuned.