Lately I’ve been donating dozens of books to the Sally Army. I brought a few more yesterday and on the way out noticed they have started giving away books, presumably deeming them unsaleable. The other day I found a book I’d recently donated in the pile—Against the Current, by Isaiah Berlin. When I pointed this out, the manager apologised and said they’d had a new volunteer who didn’t understand that such a book would have value to certain readers, as indeed it once did to me. me. So I went again yesterday two more books, both ranting against Islam as it happens.
How I acquired them I no longer recall, except that Karleen used to do secretarial work for Earl McKenzie, university lecturer in Jamaica, and typed his long review on V S Naipaul’s novel, A House for Mr Biswas, And as for Salman Rushdie, I’d bought his Midnight’s Children, when it won the Booker Prize in 1981, The first few chapters were interesting, but it was a long tedious book. My days of pretending to be an intellectual and enjoying philosophers such as Hume and Wittgenstein are no more.
My reader will be bored, shall I even publish this? The days of showing off and planning an actual book are gone, but my hobbies remain DIY, or bricolage in French, and scribbling in note book and blog posts. And so yesterday I went again to the shop and saw out in front a tattered paperback copy of War and Peace, Vol. 1. The back had been torn off. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to fix it up. Found a pic of the back via Google Images, stuck it on with PVA adhesive, and used a Sharpie to re-blacken the spine, and make the faded title legible again, for good measure.
a wayfarer’s notes 
I’m shocked by the number of acquaintances I have, whom I consider intelligent, but never read a book. They don’t have time, they say.
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It must be the seduction of smartphones, online games and social media, which fill in the odd intervals between other activities. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, when I commuted to work in London, by train and Tube, many books were being read, sometimes even when strap-hanging. I did sometimes, but more often I’d be scribbling, as described here
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