The Usefulness of an Emergency Book Cache.

This afternoon, having decided I needed to pop out to the shops, I decided to not bother with my phone, made sure the back door was locked and slammed shut the front door...realising as I did so that I had just locked myself out. Since the local phone boxes were (predictably) not working I walked slowly around the shops, and then slowly drank some tea in the supermarket cafe.

Unable to draw this out any longer I arrived back at home still with a couple of hours to kill before the arrival of Hodmandod Senior and it was at this point that I realised I could get into my shed and, more importantly, my emergency book cache.


A couple of years ago I decided to collect all the Booker winners - most of which I have read - but a few remain outstanding....and so it was I alighted upon Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The first couple of sentences run on through several characters without introduction, which I found perplexing, but I persevered and in doing so realised it was part of a joke, a way of dragging the reader into gossip, which I thought very witty.

When Hodmandod Senior arrived I was still engrossed, but then returned to the book I was reading before I left - the extraordinary Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough...which ironically enough is all about memory.

The moral of this story is always keep a cache of book to hand in your shed in case of emergencies.