I'm Going To Repeat Myself In This Post....Sorry About That

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well I'm writing this at 3:32am on a Friday morning. Insomnia me as arrived for two days in a row, I've put a recording of last Sunday's match in the Irn Bru cup (yes there is such a thing as I've learnt  last week) between the Scottish team Livingston and the Welsh team The New Saints on the TV. The DVR, and the video recorder before it, is really the insomniac's best friend.

Anyway yesterday finished the last two of the library books I took out a few weeks back. So going to begin by giving you a warning that on the first book I'm about to repeat myself. But it's worth saying.

Queen Camilla by Sue Townsend is absolutely brilliant. Off the top of my head she was the last popular writer that I can recall. Not popular in the bestselling sense (though she was that) but in that she could appeal to a wide range of people whilst in a humorous way give us a not always flattering picture of Britain. She is unfortunately no longer with us and she is missed.

Now that I've finished Tiny Stations by Dixe Wills I feel that I should make a new shelf to put this book in and mark it "curate's egg".

The book is about his journey through the "request stop" train stations in Britain. This is the first problem. For he doesn't visit all of these all of these places, not even half and I felt cheated by that. To be fair that isn't necessarily Dixe Wells' fault more the person who wrote the blurb. Still it created a problem for me from the start.

Secondly when describing the individual history of these stations he can be a bit trainspottery (or rather trainstationspottery). Clearly Wells did his research but it could have done with a bit of editing if you ask me.

However when he writes about his experiences at the stations and the surrounding area it is interesting and worth the read. Those were the bits I enjoyed. To be honest I think this is the sort of book that you would have been dissatisfied with if you'd bought it but feel perfectly OK with if borrowed from the library or received as a gift.

So today I'm amongst other things off to the library to bring these books back and to borrow the next football book. I'm three days late so will have to pay a fine. The wild and criminal things I do just to finish a couple of books.

Until the next time.

In Which Feeding My Addiction......To Books Continues

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Yesterday (Tuesday)was a day where there were things to do before I went to work on the afternoon/evening shift. First off was the library, not Porthcawl but Pyle where I needed to get a few documents printed and photocopied (our printer having run out of ink and discovering that looking for new cartridges was about as simple as discovering the source of the Nile).

Now I hadn't intended to borrow a book at a different library, honestly. But I was tempted.

Dixe Wills - Tiny Stations

This is about a man who decides to visit every request stop train station in Britain. It's the sort of one person mad challenge story that attracted me. So it was borrowed.

Now we had a viewing on the house at 1pm which meant we needed to get out well before that. The wife suggested that we as a family had lunch together. I said no on the grounds that as I was working I'd be too busy clock watching. So wife/daughter went out by themselves and I would spend the ninety minutes of free time left by having lunch in Porthcawl..and visiting the library.

I'd decided to read all the Sue Townsend books that I hadn't yet read having seen a documentary about her recently. Pyle library didn't have anything but Porthcawl did (aside from the one I'd already written and raved about before). It was this.

Sue Townsend - Queen Camilla

I'd read The Queen and I and loved it so am looking forward to reading this one.

Now being Porthcawl Library this also meant that I needed a football book to replace the disaster that was Sam Allardyce's autobiography. This was the one I picked.

Michael Calvin - The Nowhere Men

This is a book about football talent spotters. It does on the surface link in to the Oliver Kay book on Adrian Doherty I spoke about recently.

After that I even had a bit of time to buy a Penguin paperback from the Porthcawl Animal Welfare Shop.

Penguin Modern Poets 17 - David Gascoyne - W S Graham - Kathleen Raine

It only cost me 20p. Which means I've still got £1.40 in the Penguin book budget.

And amazingly I finished reading a book too. Geology in the Service of Man (1950 edition) by W G Fearnsides and O M B Bulman. Now to be honest I found it to be a literary sleeping pill but it doesn't matter. It's I who am the weird collector of vintage Pelican/Penguin paperbacks. So if these books are on a subject that normally I wouldn't read about then it's hardly the authors' fault. Mind you the description of the book as "Eminently readable" on the cover? Rocky if you ask me.

So that means I need another Pelican/Penguin paperback to fill the void there. From the great unread it turns out to be.

1149 - Ellery Queen -The Roman Hat Mystery

You know off the top of my head G K Chesterton and Ellery Queen were the only "classic" crime writers I've never got round to reading. At least one of those anomalies will be resolved in the future.

What this all means is that if we remember the Michael Palin book I read in the car I have now six books on the go,

Yes I know.

But when you have an addiction to reading it's hard to let it go. Even if  only slightly.

Until the next time.