MY favourite pre-holiday activity is browsing in my local bookshop for poolside reads. So what if there aren't four floors of books to choose from? Sometimes being confronted with too much choice is like struggling through a menu that runs to a dozen pages. All that flipping back and forth, your previously empty and rumbling stomach now churning madly in confusion.

Choice can be fantastic - like nipping into Tam Shepherd's for a Captain Hook's hook and being offered a selection of five different models. Other times, tiny is good. Curiously, even in a bookshop that's smaller than your average living room, you always find something to buy.

Before having children, I have to admit that I rarely ventured into a local bookshop. My novels were bought at various enormous stores - mainly close to Piccadilly Circus where I worked. Then our twins arrived, and Piccadilly Circus might as well have been Pluto in terms of how feasible it was to get there. Which was unfortunate, as what most new mothers need is a darn good book to reassure them that they're not failing dismally as parents if they're not massaging their young charges thrice daily.

In the fug of early motherhood, with J having had the audacity to return to work, I stumbled into an independent bookshop in Bethnal Green. I had barely registered it before - dismissing it as too Tantric, too dangly-crystals for my taste - but went in wild-eyed and desperate, and snatched the friendliest-looking tome on offer (by the eerily-youthful Miriam Stoppard, I seem to recall). Although the book is long-lost, I remember it being fantastically reassuring. More importantly, my quest had drawn me into this brilliant little store three streets away from our house. I could even ram the double buggy in through its doorway - just.

We moved to South Lanarkshire where, a minute's dash from our house, was Atkinson Pryce - a cosy, intimate little bookshop on Biggar High Street. The staff soon got to know us as our then two-year-old sons would fiddle with the shop's heater controls, remove all the greetings cards from their stand and pile up books on the floor. The shop has a small toy cupboard, which was soon emptied, its contents strewn around willy-nilly all over the floor. Even so, we were never treated as undesirables, as you often are with young children when you try to enter a small shop, and the sales assistant starts sweating visibly and pretends she's just closing. She might smile, but in that forced, wincing way as if she has detected a terrible stench, or is constipated. As happened, in fact, when - for some unfathomable reason - I took my young children into Agent Provocateur in Soho in an attempt to buy myself some faintly alluring underwear. I wanted something silky and delicate called "Esme" or "Violette", not Big Old Saggy-Cupped Milk Bra. Picking up some lacy scrap of a thing, I dangled it in front of the glamorous assistant and asked if she thought it was a good choice (in truth, I wasn't even sure what it was). She looked at it, then at me, then at the children in their buggy - and snorted, like a horse. Begone, tragic woman, that snort said, with your tatty pram and grubby children, which are doing nothing to enhance our brand. What could you possibly want with our foxy wares?

These days I buy my undies online but try to shop locally for books. Anything else feels - well, a little two-timey. OK, occasionally a vast range is alluring and three-for-two offers irresistible.

I think we should all try to balance it out. Otherwise, one day we'll fancy a browse and a chat and head to an independent bookshop, feeling (as I do every time, even after nine years here) so lucky to have it virtually on the doorstep. We'll wonder where all the books have gone and why the shop is crammed full of doughnuts and sausage rolls. Then we'll realise it's morphed into a Greggs.