I thought I'd been lucky this morning, when the doorbell rang five minutes before I was due to leave for work, and was revealed to be a postman with a letter for me to sign for. Hurrah, a credit card replacement that wasn't going to involve me scratching my head trying to find somewhere to get it redelivered to on a weekday where I'd actually be ( Read more... )

My local library has just undergone a long and expensive refit. It has now reopened, in its shiny new state, with computers offering internet access scattered all around it. It proudly boasts of lots of new books. But tonight I made my first visit to it for years, walking both floors in their entirety to find out what sections now lived where, and ( Read more... )

And I've not been tagged, just ran across it on friendsfriends. But I thought I'd do it again, since for once the nearest book isn't something boring like a computer manual. Okay, so technically it's my PDA and whatever's the currently open book in Mobipocket, but I'll go for the actual paper book that's next nearest, since the concept of pages in ( Read more... )

Here it goes again. Good Friday is cued by a sky like soup, intermittent howling gales that scream through the airbrick in my kitchen and are giving me chilly ankles as the gusts force their way through gaps in the walls of my conservatory and then through the french windows as well to emit a chilly breeze by my desk. Miscellaneous bits of grit and ( Read more... )

... or, in this case, buying books about Oxford from an Oxford bookshop ( Read more... )

Over the past few days I've discussed with koalathebear a time or two the capacity some people have to kick in the teeth of other people's enjoyment of Harry Potter. The "you're an adult, you shouldn't be reading childrens' books" attitude ( Read more... )

On Saturday morning I got up and looked out into the back garden and found that somebody had been turning it into a junkyard. I found two no longer serviceable cricket-sized balls, one pair of plastic protective glasses of the sort used for DIY, and an empty cigarette lighter ( Read more... )

Annoyingly, the strawberries I bought yesterday afternoon, which have a use-by date of tomorrow have sneakily gone off. Bah. Serves me right for buying them out of season, I suppose, but I manage to rescue all but about five of them, and am eating them now, drizzled in chocolate, courtesy of some slightly microwaved Phish Food. And very nice they ( Read more... )

I have no clue what thought process prompted me to do it, other than that I was musing on books and writing in general today, but this morning I fired up Google and typed in Dick Francis's name. I'm not even sure what I thought I was looking for, since I've got a shelf full of his books, a scribbled note somewhere of the ones that I don't possess, ( Read more... )

Clearly I need to re-read the Sharpe books. There was a whole siege sequence in the second part of the new film that was bugging me like crazy as I watched it. I knew that I'd seen that particular plot device in one of Cornwell's books - the ( spoiler )