Book sale

You have to be hard-hearted when you're getting rid of books.  In our book sale today we've sold all the Dr Who titles we had - over a hundred of them.  They weren't a problem sentimental-wise, because they belonged originally to my son and we had no attachment to them.  But seeing some other books go out at 50c which were books that you once loved, is a little different....!  On the other hand we've also sold a lot of books that we've never loved particularly: they've just managed to find their way onto our shelves and take up space.  There's something about books; no matter how hard you try to get rid of them, new ones call out for a place in your house.

The sale was listed to start at 8 am, though we expected we might get a few early birds.  However, the really early bird arrived at 6.20, and my daughter, from her upstairs window, told them to come back no earlier than 7.30.  I think the Dr Who were the drawcard.   At 6.20 we weren't even up.  Having something like this going on at your house means you don't sleep well anyway (it's like having to get up early to catch a plane) and both of us had had a disturbed night.  Plus the dog decided to do a funny coughing thing about 4 am, and wouldn't settle.  Most unusual.  Maybe he was concerned as to how many people he was going to have to bark at during the morning.

Anyway we had someone else (a dealer) come just around seven and thought we might as well get on with it. Another couple of guys - also dealers - arrived with a great whiz and a bang ten minutes later, barging into the house as though we'd better not stop them or else!  Strange way to come into someone's home. 

Subsequent customers have been much more polite, and we've had some interesting conversations, and have caught up with some people we haven't seen for a while.  We've cleared around 180 books this morning, but there are still some twenty boxes sitting there, though they're not so tightly packed as they were.  Well, we'll see what the rest of the day brings.  At the moment there's a bit of a lull...

On holiday

On the way up in the car to Otematata we listened to some Agatha Christie short stories (The Listerdale Mystery) read by Edward Petherbridge. None of them were mystery stories in the usual Christie sense; rather it was if she was having time off and was writing for the sheer fun of it. The tone of the stories was much more like P G Wodehouse, in fact, and there was a delight in the use of words, and a wit you don‘t necessarily associate with Christie. Two fo the stories had a hero named George, which seemed a bit odd; in fact initially we thought we’d put the same tape back in. But the two Georges were very different, as it turned out. Petherbridge does the reading very well, with a great ability to delineate the different characters.
In the evening we watched the TV version of a Philip Pullman story, The Ruby in the Smoke, in the evening. I’d gone off Pullman after the bad theology of His Dark Materials series, but in this story he’s pitting good against evil without anything more theological than just plain storytelling. A host of well-played characters appeared within the first five minutes, but they sorted themselves out in due course, and an exciting story with constant twists. Julie Walters had a ball as the villainess, Mrs Holland, whose desire to have the ruby in question left her no room for qualms about killing people off. The highlight of her role was removing her false teeth (they’d belonged to her deceased husband and she wasn’t going to see them wasted going to the grave with him), and washing them off in her cup of tea. She conveyed a great sense of menace even with her death mask of a face, and an inability to see her evil as anything other than necessary. Billie Piper from the Dr Who series played the heroine.
The story was set in late Victorian times (I think), a period in which men were no longer so concerned about no wearing their suitcoats at all times (particularly indoors), and young women had stopped wearing bonnets out in the street, and were free to go unchaperoned.