Amazing new plans for Arlington House Margate

More ravings from the bookshop

Secondhand bookshops are by their very nature a little odd , tugging at the rubber sheet of reality is the nearest I can get to this, something along the lines of it’s the proprietors job not to notice the function too closely, so the right books appear at the right time for the right people.

As we sail, seemingly without any map, into a brave new world where there are far fewer secondhand bookshops, I am trying to come up with something that could redefine this type of shop so that it could still function beyond the paperless book and the internet.

A further thought here is what would be the effect on humanity lo live in rooms without books, the knowledge stored but in digital form, no paper no ink no sewing no binding?

The first thing I look at when I go into someone’s home is their books, without them, well I just don’t know, I shall digress.

Sitting behind the desk in the bookshop with a large cup of tea in a cup that says I love coffee on it, I find myself confronted by some of the many bizarre questions raised by life.

Somehow during a shortage brought on by Christmas, snow, truth is I don’t really know, we seem to have toilet paper with a pattern on it. Who would devise such a thing, I can’t really imagine, every time you use it you first think you are the victim of some strange internal disease. It is only when the hypochondria subsides into the back of your mind and you realise that you have been caught once again, that temporary relief from hypochondria flood sin.

I am the type of person who believes that acupuncture works by making it hurt more somewhere else and therefore directing your mind away from the problem, all that eastern mystical cure resolved into - if you stamp on your toe your ear will stop hurting, assuming you had earache in the first place.

The taking away of a malady that didn’t exist in the first place, well it is some strange area in the sensation of personal ill or wellbeing.

Staying on the mystical plane for a moment I was contemplating how the god of atheists would work, based on the principle that any gods existence is based on the sum of human belief. There must be a deity something like the square root of minus one in the god bothering world, presumably not bothered at all.

Another strange thing that came out of the festive season is my new jumper, this seems to be made of the wool equivalent of Velcro and everything sticks to it.

There is an upside to all of this too, the chef Toby rushed out of Age & Son to give my children petites madeleines in deference to Marcel Proust, this is to do with associations and the meaning of flavour perhaps.

I am just playing with bloggers new editor here

Particularly to see if I can post images better with it

Click on the pictures and then click on them again to see what I mean big or what?

Books do furnish a room

One of my odd posts to my little used and little read blog, excuse any errors I am writing it with a notebook and really need to get stronger reading glasses, so it is all a bit, through a glass darkly.

I was just reading Simon’s post on Thanet life where he is extolling the virtues of the electronic book, when it occurred to me that with digital storage of music and books a whole area of communicating ones self by ones surroundings is going.

During the 1900s there was a flowering of literature and music and I count myself very lucky to have lived through it, much of this hinged around two things the cheap paperback book, initially driven by Allen Lane with the sixpenny penguin book and the gramophone record.
The nature of both of these medias meant that the other people that enjoyed them, kept them where they lived and the fact that they were visible expressed much about the person.

I suppose this even extends to books of playable music, there is also the area where a persons non-fiction books expresses their interests.

I groan when I enter a room where the books have been selected by the book club that a person happened to join and the Readers Digest or whatever seem to keep coming in some sort of unstoppable way, to a point where the books were never opened.

I am afraid I groan in much the same way at lines of the sort of English lituture that is of the type set for GCE examination when I was at school, it’s not that I haven’t both enjoyed and been depressed by Thomas Hardy, rather in the same way that I wouldn’t have missed Beethoven’s symphonies.

No it is when this stops somewhere around D H Lawrence and Edward Elgar, when these are not accompanied by John Fowles or David Lodge or Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison, where has the person with the book collection been during their lives.

Anyway as a bookseller and therefore inevitably part of this conspiracy I am considering the these new machines that will inevitably make me redundant eventually.

My reading mind at the moment is in the world of 1984 and Brave New World as I am reading We (by Yevgeny Zamyatin the 1921 Russian novel that predates both of them and must have inspired them both) so I suppose it would be appropriate for me to be reading this from a machine as it is based in the future.


Sorry about that, I can only say that the square root of minus one is lurking unresolved in the back on my mind.

There are key bits of literature and music like say A Clockwork Orange or Sgnt Pepper, which at my age one can hardly have lived in ones own time without, so yes it is peoples collections of fiction and music that in furnishing there rooms, communicates much to me.

I suppose looking round this room there is the inevitable area expressing a sort of chaos of the mind and it as though in some places the books have been breeding and interlopers like Love Signs have appeared. This one could be construed as the message a sign of love.

Or strange areas where singles have appeared with video tapes, both now redundant media.

What is worse than anything I can contemplate is some sort of living room without books, like introducing a waiting room into a home.

Runaway bull's supermarket sweep

Click on the link for another amusing video http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8017391.stm

German training video

This is not suitable for young people or the squeamish so I haven’t published it on my main blog http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/ but as I had to get a forklift truck licence years ago I couldn’t miss sharing this with a few of my old chums from those days.

Picture poster

I am having problems posting pictures hosted on my own site on my thanetonline blog so this is an experiment.