WHEN I imagine running away and starting a new life I always end up returning to the same one or two fantasies.

One of them involves moving to Berwick-upon-Tweed (I do like Berwick-upon-Tweed) and writing detective novels. The other involves moving to somewhere seaside-adjacent (it doesn’t have to be Berwick-upon-Tweed; Dunbar might do) and opening a bookshop to sell detective novels (and other kinds of books – I’m less fussy in this particular daydream).

The latter scenario, I’ve realised, is basically an admission that I want to live inside a Jenny Colgan novel (yes, I recently read The Christmas Bookshop and loved it, even if it was set in Edinburgh rather than Elie).

It is possible I am not alone in this fantasy. Last year the number of independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland hit a 10-year high, a sixth consecutive year of growth. One of the few small silver linings of the awfulness of Covid has been people rediscovering the joy of reading.

Read more: The joy of radio by Teddy Jamieson

There’s even been a suggestion that in recent years such bookshops have benefited from the rise in “conscious consumerism” which has seen some turn away from the likes of Amazon to support local businesses.

More than likely there is one of these bookshops near you. Glasgow and Edinburgh are well served with indy stores and even out in the sticks it’s not hard to find one (Far From the Madding Crowd in Linlithgow is probably the closest to me. It has a great children’s book section).

One shouldn’t overstate these figures. The number is still relatively small – we are talking 1072 bookshops in all – and prior to 2016 indy bookshop numbers had been dropping for 20 years between 1995 and 2016.

Meanwhile, bookstores, like high street shops of all kinds, are in the eye of the storm when it comes to the cost of living crisis. Margins are tight and tightening. It can be a parlous business as the sad closure of Outwith Books in Govanhill last September should remind us. Love and passion can only take you so far in business. Sometimes circumstances are against you.

In short, it is not a fantasy – or a reality, let’s face it – that can factor in soaring profits. Books and bling don’t really go together. (It’s also worth remembering that the median income of professional writers is just £7,000 a year.)

As someone who has previous in this area – some seven years working in a couple of High Street book chains back in the late-1980s/early 1990s – I’m all too aware that bookselling is not a recipe for accruing disposable income.

But there are other forms of currency. Colleen Hoover, best-selling author and “BookTok queen” (no, me neither; we’re all getting on a bit), responding to the news of the rise in indy bookshops summed it up well.

“Bookshops,” she said, “bring social and cultural capital to every town, village, suburb or city centre they are part of.”

In short, bookshops are hubs; a source of community and connection in their locale, part of the heavy lifting cultural institutions big and small carry out every day around the country, without which life would be much quieter and less interesting.

The reason some of us fantasise about the idea of running a bookshop is because bookshops are somewhere we choose to spend our time. Time never wasted. Even if you don’t buy anything (though, obviously, that doesn’t help the people running them, so do try).

Teddy Jamieson: A life spotted in the margins of a diary

Running a bookshop must be as common a fantasy as writing a novel; a pleasant thought but probably not going to happen for most of us.

And yet, what’s clear is that there are people around the country doing just that; finding a space in their community, doing it up, ordering stock and welcoming people in.

In doing so, they are living out their dream and improving the cultural life of where they live into the bargain. As Jenny Colgan already knows, there’s probably a book in that.