I like the unexpected joy of coming across a place in a novel and knowing it really exists, and in a few cases, the even deeper joy of actually having been there. It happened this evening. Browsing in Waterstones on Oxford Street this evening, I picked up a copy of Norman Collins's "London belongs to me"; a tale of ordinary, unexceptional Londoners living humdrum lives but in the trembling, nervous days before the outbreak of World War two.

Funny, how your eyes can riffle through a page of text and spot treasure. Thumbing through the novel's early pages, I saw Cannon Street mentioned, a road I've walked across or along for nearly ten years, then further on, the name of a pub appeared like a sunbeam splitting a cloudy sky in half - the Bunch of Grapes.

I walk past this small, rectangle of a pub virtually every day; glimpsing the opaque shadows of city workers through the mullioned windows; catching stray fragments of conversations from the small groups smoking outside, clustered around the beer barrels that double as tables.

I've always suspected, if only by it's age, that this pub had history, that there must be stories soaked into the floorboards and a bar aching with gossip. Now I know.