AS I SET OFF to begin the year in Paris, which makes me feel thrillingly unserious, like someone in a Wilde play, I am taking with me volume five of the essays of Virginia Woolf. This might seem a proper counterweight to my flighty and not very earnestly important trip, but Woolf is far from being a bluestocking companion. Her essays are delightful in the way that serious play is delightful. She is enjoying herself, and reading her gives me that leaping sense of being in excellent company.

Eighty years ago, in 1929, she wrote a wonderful essay, On Not Knowing French, in which she remarks with her usual exact observation, “to know a language one must have forgotten it”: to be fluent requires a kind of unconsciousness. We all know the feeling of straining to remember every word we ever learnt of a foreign language. I usually get myself into the most frightful mess in shops because I speak confidently, but what comes out of my mouth is a very personal kind of French - possibly hardly French at all.

One of the reasons that I love to visit Shakespeare and Company, the English bookshop in Paris, is the relief of knowing that I will come away with what I had hoped to buy. Bookshops, anywhere in the world, are a haven, and their stock is talismanic - no matter how bad one's situation may be, a book can relieve it. Books are amulets against despair and charms for a better life.

That said, just before Christmas I decided to order four copies of Alison Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. These cartoons have been running for about 20 years and have become a cult. The wit, the narrative, the drawing, all mark Bechdel out as something special, and for a high-minded kind of a girl like myself, they are the literary equivalent of lounging in a hot tub drinking gin sling.

So I set off towards my local bookshop, the Borzoi, in Stow-on-the-Wold, and then I had a panic attack and found myself calling our very own literary editor, Erica Wagner: I wanted to be sure that I had the title of Bechdel's book just right. It's all very well ordering a book called The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For in London or Manchester or Paris or San Francisco, but my bookshop is full of retired gentry piling up their biographies of Churchill and taking home multiple copies of Niall Ferguson. Even as I went through the door, some chap was booming away about ordering the Schofield Bible and had they got that “Mitford thingy?”

Erica calmed me down - she is like human chicken soup - and I lurked in the poetry section until there was a lull, then I babbled my request.

No, they didn't have it in stock, but, and, what was the title again? Dykes? At that moment a dozen colonels' wives appeared at once, so quick-thinking Kevin at the counter said: “I will find that book about HOLLAND for you.”

Sure enough, a few days later, the call came, and Anthea, who runs the shop and always wears pearls, said: “Your HOLLAND books are in. We've got them under the counter for you - in a bag.”

So I went and collected my dykes, and just to save face ordered a vastly expensive print-on-demand copy of Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I had to do this so that I too could boom a title over the counter, instead of finding myself speaking something like French - or certainly a language where none of the words meant what I thought they meant.

Well, in my village, down from Stow, my humble collection of cottage-plus-ruin-plus-outbuildings-plus-wood where I live is often pointed out by a rather grand lady near by as the abode of “our homosexual authoress” (the only one in the village). I suppose I should be writing racy novels in a tweed skirt and brogues, but then everybody else around here wears those.

Thinking back to Oscar Wilde, we have certainly moved on from the love that dare not speak its name, but there still might be a few problems calling a spade a spade. On the other hand, I would rather be called a spade than a “homosexual authoress”.

So it's over to Paris, where writers of every kind have always found a second home, perhaps because, as Woolf goes on to say in her essay, a language not one's own brings its own strange freedom.

Look for me on a stone bench on the Pont Neuf. I'll be reading Woolf and carrying a spade.

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