About a year ago, the University library here at Leeds started selling coloured canvas bags with the word 'Sshhh!' printed on them, for people to carry their library books around in. For the sorts of unfathomable reasons that I suppose usually lie behind such fashion trends, they became a massive hit, quickly selling out and having to be re-ordered in vast numbers. It's unusual to walk across campus without seeing about twenty of them, hanging from people's hands, sitting on desks or lying on the grass in the (rare) sunshine.
Now, the library have set up
a website which is charting the travels of these bags across the world as people take them on their summer holidays. They've got to Japan, Finland, the Cayman islands and sub-Saharan Africa. As yet, however, none seem to have been photographed in Belfast, Vienna or Bratislava - all cities which I will be visiting in late August and early September. So today I am going to buy one (in purple, natch), and be sure to photograph it in distinctive local venues when I go.
I am, incidentally, massively behind with LJ, because I have spent far too much time recently doing interesting things or having guests round, and far too little writing about it. Probably the right way to lean, really, but it does mean I won't then have records of the interesting things in the future. So this is me trying to break the ice and get back into the habit.