I picked up a new copy of Flying Start the reminiscences of Hugh Dundas one-time

I picked up a new copy of Flying Start, the reminiscences of Hugh Dundas, one-time chairman of Thames TV and former Battle of Britain pilot, for pounds 2.If you carry on up this side of Charing Cross Road you will inevitably hit Foyle's and its idiosyncratic collection of salespersons, whose variable command of English and occasional familiarity with the stock make for a unique book-buying (or not-buying) experience.There are scattered selected secondhand books in among the stock, but they tend to be priced up on the grounds of rarity. Getting to know this shop is a career in itself, and you should set aside a day devoted to it alone.So cross back again to the east side and go into the very last store before Centrepoint, handily opposite an Ann Summers sex shop. Called Bookcase, the fun is downstairs past the usual collection of remaindered "art" (= nude) books. This is an excellent secondhand basement with a terrific archaeology and history section, though not desperately cheap, and also large quantities of new children's books.

A few brand-new volumes of the outstanding modern edition of Pepys's Diary can be had here for a tenner (normal price pounds 35), so if you're one of the many people who bought the earlier volumes when they came out and missed the Companion and the Index, then here's your chance.This part of London is especially revolting. It's the unpleasant end of Oxford Street, distinguished by peeling posters, filthy pavements, huge black puddles by gutters, crateloads of fast food-wrapper rubbish and vast numbers of people handing out English-lesson advertisement cards.So perhaps it's time to hit the Tube at Tottenham Court Road and escape. A fistload of proper chips can be had at Dionysus Fish Bar (on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road) before you go, and they make a pleasant reward for all the foot-slogging.There are plenty of other bookshops in the area. Unsworths in Gower Street is the mother of all remaindered-book bookshops.Close by in Great Russell Street, on the corner with Gower Street is Museum Books, packed with all sorts of archaeology and Egyptology classics, and just past it is the Antiquarian Book Arcade.Bloomsbury Bookshop in Bury Place, further along Great Russell Street past the British Museum, has a congested collection of secondhand academic books.Finally, Skoob Books in Sicilian Avenue, between Bloomsbury Way and Southampton Row, has something of everything and is close to Holborn Tube. Some of these shops are open on Sundays but don't count on it.

Saturday is the day and don't start before 10am, better still 11am. IT WAS during a camping trip in Derbyshire last summer with my two older sisters, my niece, nephew and assorted partners and in-laws, when, in the hope of avoiding the almost inevitable family argument, we found ourselves planning a full day's cycling trip on a network of abandoned railway lines. Given all that proximity, riding ourselves into a state of exhaustion seemed like a canny idea. We assembled at the cycle-hire centre in Ashbourne where the delightful staff assembled a train of five mountain bikes and two children's buggies. The trains that used to huff and puff along these tracks have been replaced by people who do much the same thing. From the look of our fellow travellers, the route is a haven for the unfit and middle-aged who attempt to demonstrate to their families that they are not ready for the sidings yet. The buggies were sturdy contraptions that fixed to the centre of the rear wheel.

Three-year-old Harriette took to hers immediately, with the wide, look-at-me grin of a princess in a carriage Two-year-old Tom was less certain. His toddler's intuition told him that if he climbed into the strange pram-like affair he wouldn't be able to crawl around for a while. A diversionary finger of KitKat bought enough time to strap him in, and we were away.The first leg of the journey was along the Tissington Trail, which covers 13 miles from Ashbourne to Parsley Hay in the Peak District National Park. It runs along the route of the Ashbourne to Buxton line - which opened almost exactly a century ago on 4 June 1899 - and the section was constructed at the tail end of railway building in the region.

serving as a branch line, taking milk and limestone to places such as Buxton. It closed in 1963.We pulled out of Ashbourne under swooping branches which cast a mottled shadow over the gravel path. Like the trains that used to run here, our pace could best be described as a chug. The children were remarkably good- humoured, certainly more so than I would have been had I been dragged in a cart behind a bike along a dusty track. Tom alternated between sleeping, gurgling and bawling; Harriette sang, beamed and picked wild flowers - sorry about that.After a detour to take in an open-air lunch at the Waterloo Inn in Biggin, we rejoined the trail and continued the fractional ascent to Parsley Hay. Then it was a sharp right, to link up with the High Peak Trail which runs for 17-and-a-half miles from Buxton to Cromford.The Cromford and High Peak Railway, whose former route this section follows, was opened in 1830 and was as commercially unsuccessful as the later Ashbourne- to-Buxton line.