I was standing by the river in Canterbury today watching a
rather intelligent looking rat. The rat appeared to have acquired a human sized
sandwich cut up into rat sandwich sized pieces which it had stored nearby and
every so often having finished one rat sized sandwich it would go off and get
another one and then come back and sit in front of me and carry on eating.
The mixture of thoughts about bubonic plague to the little
paws like human hands ran through my mind as they do, but what happens about
this. I doubt Canterbury Council will be engaging a pied piper or offering a
ransom per tail to enterprising rat catchers.
I can see there would also be issues over any mass
extermination schemes based on poisoning the local wildlife or arming local teenagers.
Personally I find the rats more interesting to watch than
the other wildlife, I also get the feeling that this is reciprocal as I am sure
the rats watch me with some speculation, I am fairly certain that my reflection
often appears in their eyes.
Something that interests me in Canterbury is the bookshops,
recently the biggest one closed down for ever, this was the St Margaret’s
Street branch of Waterstones, which (correct me if I’m wrong) was the largest
bookshop in East Kent and possibly even Kent.
Now if a significant library, art gallery, theatre or
historical attraction had closed it would have been major news item but being
just another bookshop, or for that matter shop, there wasn’t a ripple on the
waters of the major media.
Anyway off I went to the remaining much smaller Waterstone’s
to browse the books, my main interest is in the history books about this area,
East Kent, frankly it is not a large section, the loss of the bigger branch is
very significant. Up in the lift to the general history section, also much
smaller.
They did have Asser's life of King Alfred but it was well
over a tenner and the physical book is available new on line for significantly
less than a tenner, so I just browsed away.
We don’t have it in stock at the moment, and I have now
resorted to reading the bits I want online https://archive.org/stream/asserslifeofking00asseiala/asserslifeofking00asseiala_djvu.txt
The other book I consulted while I was in Waterstones we the
Kent edition of The Buildings of England, I have the current edition, but it’s
too long and sticks out of my pocket, I have kept the older one and often carry
it around with me, but I hadn’t got either with me.
I noticed the current edition is now £35 and speculated on
living in a time where three ordinary new books could cost over £100 in a shop but
would be much cheaper on the internet.
I considered like King Alfred having a moaning prayer; “he
complained and made moan to the Lord, and to all who were admitted to his
familiarity and affection, that Almighty God had made him ignorant of divine
wisdom and of the liberal Arts” I think this is now summarised as OMG, although personally
I think I prefer, made moan to the Lord MMTTL.
On to Chaucer Bookshop where I bought six old photos of
Ramsgate, obviously they all date from the same date, anyone fancy guessing the
date?
Back to my own bookshop and here are the books that went out
yesterday http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/landscapes-of-britain-in-bookshop.html
I may ramble on after supper, I hope not to burn it like
King Alfred, curry which takes half an hour cooking and preparation and costs
about 30p per head – don’t ask.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.