When I was taken on my first big holiday in my campervan by my two humans, we went to a place called Wales. There were hills and mountains, rivers, streams, and big lake things called reservoirs. Best of all, there were lots of walks. Some of them were quite difficult, steep and stony, but I managed alright. When I couldn’t, I was carried for a while, as I was still quite young.
We went to small towns, with lots of friendly people who made a fuss of me because I looked cute (well, that’s what they said – I wasn’t sure whether or not it was good to look cute, but it seemed to work).
One of the towns we visited was called Hay-on-Wye (funny name) and it had masses of book shops, which my humans seemed to like going into, then standing around just looking at the shelves where the books were. Sometimes they’d get hold of a book and look inside it, then put it back on the shelf. Seemed a bit boring to me, but I sat still and watched what the other people in the shop were doing. It was the same kind of thing.
As we walked around the town, going into book shop after book shop, the human who feeds me pointed to a sign outside one of the shops, got her camera and took a photo of it. She seemed really excited because the sign had MY NAME on it! Boz!
Well, when I thought about it, it was rather impressive to find a book shop named after me, especially as I’d never been to Hay-on-Wye before. Then she started babbling on about my name. You see, Boz is the shortened version of Bosworth, but it apparently it happens to be the pen name used by Charles Dickens who was some famous author I think. Or at least someone who wrote books. So I suppose it was a good idea to use my name for a book shop. I liked it anyway.
Ediorial note:
Dickens was first a freelance journalist, becoming a parliamentary commentator in 1833. He wrote serialised sketches in periodicals which were published under the title “Sketches by Boz” in 1836. The year 1836 was a significant one for Dickens. He married Caroline, daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, and publisher of “Sketches by Boz”, and his first novel, “The Pickwick Papers”, was published.