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poliphiloWe put Sandra on her train- which was one of the few that hadn't been cancelled- and I said, "What I'd really like to do now is go to the really big bookshop on Grove Rd."
Camilla's Bookshop is legendary. It's been in place for a very long time, has books from floor to ceiling (I don't know how they reach them down from the high shelves, I really don't) and there's a parrot. I could hear Ailz and others singing to the parrot while I rummaged among the stacks. Apparently if you dance as well as sing the parrot will sing along. I think they were singing Beatles songs but I was only half-listening. I picked out titles by Haggard, Wells and Buchan- and when I presented them to Camilla (who isn't a figment but a real person) she said, "The old favourites." And I said "Yes" And she said "They tell the best stories." And I said "Yes" again.
Is that true? Was there a golden age of story-telling around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th? Could be...
In the afternoon I sat on the patio in the warm-enough winter sun and read one of my Buchans- a comedy thriller about a Russian princess in need of being rescued from evil Bolsheviki and everything happening in the paradise landscape of the West Coast of Scotland. Her would-be rescuers are a quixotic band consisting of a retired grocer, a flakey young poet and a fifteen year old hard nut from the Gorbals. Buchan is such fun. Did he teach Hitchcock everything he knew? Well, three quarters perhaps- because Buchan's world is free from that god-awful Catholic guilt that makes later Hitchcock so compellingly squirmy.
Finally, in a completely different key- a few true words from another quixotic Scot- the journalist and activist Craig Murray: "NATO is a war machine that sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites. It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus that manipulates our society, particularly as counter-narratives and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded".
Camilla's Bookshop is legendary. It's been in place for a very long time, has books from floor to ceiling (I don't know how they reach them down from the high shelves, I really don't) and there's a parrot. I could hear Ailz and others singing to the parrot while I rummaged among the stacks. Apparently if you dance as well as sing the parrot will sing along. I think they were singing Beatles songs but I was only half-listening. I picked out titles by Haggard, Wells and Buchan- and when I presented them to Camilla (who isn't a figment but a real person) she said, "The old favourites." And I said "Yes" And she said "They tell the best stories." And I said "Yes" again.
Is that true? Was there a golden age of story-telling around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th? Could be...
In the afternoon I sat on the patio in the warm-enough winter sun and read one of my Buchans- a comedy thriller about a Russian princess in need of being rescued from evil Bolsheviki and everything happening in the paradise landscape of the West Coast of Scotland. Her would-be rescuers are a quixotic band consisting of a retired grocer, a flakey young poet and a fifteen year old hard nut from the Gorbals. Buchan is such fun. Did he teach Hitchcock everything he knew? Well, three quarters perhaps- because Buchan's world is free from that god-awful Catholic guilt that makes later Hitchcock so compellingly squirmy.
Finally, in a completely different key- a few true words from another quixotic Scot- the journalist and activist Craig Murray: "NATO is a war machine that sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites. It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus that manipulates our society, particularly as counter-narratives and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded".
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Date: 2023-02-09 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-09 11:00 am (UTC)