Upcoming events at Backstory
(all at 71 Balham High Road)
SOLD OUT 1999: Manchester United, The Treble And All That
Wednesday 29th March, 7.30pm
Award-winning sports writer Matt Dickinson talks about Manchester United’s unprecedented 1999 season with Times deputy sports editor James Restall
Wednesday 5th April, 7.30pm
One of Tom’s favourite authors, who writes so well about modern relationships and the body. Talking about her latest, Milk Teeth.
Yaba Badoe: An introduction to YA (young adult)
Tuesday 11th April, 7.30pm
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker and writer who has judged a few YA book prizes. We're going to talk about her experience writing for young adults and judging prizes in that category. Come to learn about all things YA, what it takes to build new worlds and create memorable characters. Under-18s go free (but need to reserve a free ticket)
Wednesday 26th April, 7.30pm
The Costa Book Prize-winning author of Unsettled Ground and Swimming Lessons joins us to chat all about her latest, The Memory of Animals. In the book, a pandemic is sweeping the planet. Neffy joins a vaccine trial, cut off from the outside world. The novel puts isolation and humanity under the microscope.
Wednesday 3rd May, 7.30pm
In his book The Digital Republic, Jamie Susskind asks how freedom and democracy can survive in an online world of data leaks, racist algorithms and hate-filled social media. A manifesto for navigating, and managing, the increasingly digital world.
Team pick of the week
Megan recommends: Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger
Many good things in life begin with food, and this book - part memoir, part cookbook - starts with chicken. The chicken in question, fuelled by grief and hope and a craving to live and eat well, sets the scene for a beautifully written, deeply felt collection of recipes and reminiscences from Ella Risbridger. It is a pleasure to travel with her through the ups and downs of being human; she makes you cry and laugh, and feel terribly hungry. Hungry in many ways: for garlic, for butter, for life.
Our bestsellers this week
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Foster by Claire Keegan
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield - signed copies
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera - March’s Backstory book club
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
Antarctica by Claire Keegan
Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
I LOVE A SURVEY. Safe in the knowledge that they are merely one data point in a much bigger whole, people admit to the most intriguing things. Like the three Falklanders who confessed in the privacy of a referendum that they didn’t want the islands to remain a British territory, triggering a brilliant few days of Fleet Street wild goose chases. Or, wilder still, the 26% of Britons who told The Economist at the height of covid that they thought nightclubs should never reopen. There, in one stat, is why the Lib Dems have never got a hope.
At The Economist we had a bench of brainiac data geeks to commission polls and wade through stats, who had strong views on things like margins of error and sample sizes. Fortunately some of my previous employers had fewer such qualms, since one of life’s great joys for the incurably nosey is to be permitted an hour or two wielding a clipboard. Whenever I got a bit too pleased with a long read I’d been working on, I could always rely on my friends to dig out one article in particular, an “unscientific test” I once carried out for The Sunday Telegraph into the vital question of how long it would take a seagull to eat my ice cream, and whether there was a particular flavour it preferred. Here’s a glimpse of that particular experiment in all its rigour:
The resulting story appeared on page three of that weekend’s paper. Though sadly my Pulitzer got lost in the post.
All of which is to say that, though yesterday was the first time I carried out any sort of market research in the shop, it was really a return to familiar ground for me, complete with the amateurish approach and a biro tally chart on a scrap of paper that also now features scribbled-out requests for an “oat latte”, a “latte, in, 2 shots” and, incomprehensibly, “musical tables”.
Apart from the fun of asking strangers things again (and it really was fun), there was a point. One of the delights of our website is getting orders from far-flung places. So far we have shipped to South Africa, Seoul and even Solihull. I was delighted last week to receive a thank-you postcard from the recipient of one of our book subscriptions, signed off “Jon from the North”. My assumption, though, has always been that the vast majority of the shop’s in-person customers are really very local. But what exactly is the vast majority? And exactly how local?
I thought it would be fun to ask. So yesterday Megan and I did just that. Of the 70 customers we remembered to survey, just under half live in the same postcode area as the shop (SW12), so at most about a ten-minute walk away. A further quarter live in SW17, which stretches down to Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway, but would mean for most not much more than a mile’s walk. A handful each came from Streatham or Brixton Hill. Then came the outliers: one each from Edgware, Shepherd’s Bush, Tunbridge Wells, Farnham…and, erm, Australia, which is probably a bit more of a trek.
I took three things from this experiment. First, the truth of the old cliché that London is a collection of villages. Tourists might make the centre of town a different matter, but on the outskirts, we really don’t stray far from our neighbourhoods. Where were the people popping over from Battersea or Wandsworth, a short hop by the standards of anywhere other than London? (I thought it was important for the shop to be near a tube station. Perhaps I needn’t have worried.)
Second, I thought it was interesting that though people seem to go east, west and north, they don’t appear to come south. Only two people came from the main Clapham postcode (SW4), even though this is the very pleasant stroll across the common to the shop that I do every day.
And finally, I remembered how much I enjoyed asking people questions. So here’s one for you: what should I ask next?
Tom