Plans!

Once a month, unless I am off on my travels somewhere, I go along to a reading group organised by a friend and former colleague. He chose to name this group The Winston Smith Book Club. Readers of dystopian fiction will get the reference. Wikipedia describes Winston Smith, named for Winston Churchill and all the too-numerous-to-mention British Smiths, thus:

"Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The character was employed by Orwell as an everyman in the setting of the novel, a "central eye ... the reader can readily identify with."

There you go!

We have read and discussed and dissected a range of stuff, some serious, some less so. Our choice for this month is Bill Bryson's look at Britain: Notes from a Small Island. I read this years ago. Whenever I go back to it, I sort of hear it read years ago on the radio by Kerry Shale, who is in fact Canadian not American but to an English ear sounds North-American enough to fit the bill. It's strange how audio memory works. Whenever I start to read Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses I hear a young Brad Pitt, who recorded it as an audio book, which I used to listen to in my car during my commute across Greater Manchester to work. It wears off after the opening pages but it is immensely strong in the first few lines.

Anyway, I knew we had had a copy of the Bill Bryson book. No sign of it on the bookshelves, neither in nonfiction, where it belongs, nor in fiction, where it might have been mistakenly placed. Nor was it in the overspill of books piled up in the attic bedroom. Perhaps I had lent it to our daughter. She could not find it either although I would not be surprised to find it is in a box of stuff in her garage!

As I am supposed to have reread the thing by Monday, yesterday while pushing the smallest grandchild around the village in her pram I popped into the library just on the off chance that they might have a copy. To no avail alas but I was told that there was a copy in the much bigger Oldham branch. Asking for it to be sent would take too long. I could have arranged for it to be reserved for me but I was not sure if I would actually get into the town centre to collect it.

 At some point in the small hours if this morning I formulated a plan to get up early, catch a bus into town - you can use your bus pass at all hours on weekends without having to wait until after 9:30, at which point rush hour is deemed to be over - and visit the library, possible the supermarket as well, and still be back home in time for a latish breakfast. Well, it almost worked. I narrowly missed the 8.24 bus and set off walking along the bus route so that I could catch the next one, half an hour later, a couple of stops further along. It was a fine and sunny morning: perfect for a brisk stroll. I got off the bus just before the town centre library, decided not to faff about hunting the shelves but went directly to seek the help of a librarian. And why not? If we keep them busy their positions are better justified and there is less chance of their numbers being further reduced. Doing my bit to help librarians!

A very helpful young man checked his computer, at first told me that the book I wanted was a new copy and still in the process of being coded before going onto the shelf (sad face) but then confirmed that there was another copy available (happy face), found out which shelf it was on and pointed me in the right direction. He even made sure that I knew what I was doing with the clever computer-driven system which deals with taking books out and returning them to the library. This is, of course, another reason for staffing reductions in libraries. It may speed up the process and prevent long queues of borrowers at the desk but a clever machine with a scanner will not be able to tell you that it too has read that book and found it wonderful/interesting/overly sentimental/dull/badly written.

The whole transaction took no more than a few minutes and I was in with a chance of catching an almost immediate bus back home. So I gave up on the plan to go to the supermarket - I only needed the newspaper and a couple of items in any case - and scuttled off to the bus stop. As I expected, the bus I caught was the same one from which I had alighted not fifteen minutes previously. After I had got off, the bus had made its circuitous way to the bus station and then back through the town centre, eventually reaching the stop where I was now waiting. The driver nearly fell off her seat in surprise to see me again so soon!

And so I stayed on the bus into our village centre, nipped into the co-op for the paper and my odds and ends, and then walked home in time for breakfast. A masterpiece of planning (almost) perfectly executed! I suspect, however, that I have seen the best of the day. The blue sky has disappeared behind clouds and we have had rain.

Fairly normal for a Saturday morning around here!