I hope you all got plenty of books in your Christmas stockings, like I did in mine.

Along with the rest of the country's shoppers, I was saddened by the demise of Woolworths, but not before making a final trip to the Abingdon branch to buy a Titan Books compilation of Roy of the Rovers comic strips from the 1980s.

I have been enjoying a sneaky read when my boys put the book down momentarily to swap it for their Beano and Beezer annuals.

I was a big fan of the Tiger & Scorcher and Roy of the Rovers comics when I was a kid, and I'd love to get my hands on some original copies this year, perhaps at a car boot sale, or maybe on the Internet.

A while ago, a colleague bid for a pile of old Tiger & Scorchers on eBay but the bid we submitted - about £5-£10 - was unfortunately too low. Perhaps a comics dealer would be a better bet.

I never leave empty-handed from a trip to my folks' house in Hereford and this time I spotted a paperback copy of an autobiography of Sir Winston's Churchill's formative years. I haven't started it yet but I vaguely recall enjoying it before, so I'm sure it will be a good read.

My wife kindly bought me Bevis Hillier's Betjeman: A Life in Pictures, which I had seen in the second-hand section on the top floor of Blackwell's in Broad Street. Published in 1984 by John Murray, the book cost £7.50 second-hand, and I love the pictures of Betjeman, aged four or five, clutching his teddy bear.

Christmas and New Year is a good time to see family and my in-laws have arrived from Malaysia, where they currently reside.

My father-in-law Ian Rogers has brought with him a fascinating old tome, Adventure Stories for Boys, published by Odhams Press in the 1950s.

Writers include HG Wells, Captain WE Johns, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and each tale of derring-do is beautifully illustrated with black-and-white line drawings.

Mr Rogers bought the book after being awarded eight shillings and sixpence as a school prize in June, 1959.

The prize was awarded by headteacher John Somerville after 15-year-old Ian came second in his year at the grant-aided Allan Glen's School in Glasgow, which is sadly no longer operational.

The book, which now looks rather battered, was chosen with great care from a bookshop in Glasgow's Queen Street, while fellow pupils rushed out to buy books by explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

The Norwegian explorer, famed for his 1947 Kon-Tiki raft expedition across the Pacific, died in Italy aged 87, in 2002, but his stories probably live on in the homes of other former pupils of Allan Glen's School.