Author: Sue Young

The Truth Is Hiding

The truth is hiding

isn’t it?

Deep in the shadows

Under the bed

On top of the wardrobe

Inside the drawer

Behind the mirror

The truth was hiding

wasn’t it?

In the flowerbed

Among the daises

In the corner of

the garden shed

Tangled in webs

The truth was never hiding

was it?

It goes out in broad daylight

It walks in the sun

It throws the curtains open

Sits on a throne

For all to see

Takes centre stage

In your living room

You can’t escape

its looming face

Shouting and screaming

its head off

The truth is in plain sight.

We can’t – but…

We can’t unsend an email

Unscramble an egg

Take back what we said

Bring back the dead

We can’t uncry the tears

Blank that written page

Reverse that move

Rewind our age

We can’t put the genie back in the lamp

Uneat that cake

Unabsorb that toxicity

Make truth from fake

We can’t unopen that box

Break the paradigm

Mend the mirror

Go back in time

We can’t stem the tide

Undream a dream

Unsmoke the fire

Unsee what we’ve seen

Too many CAN’TS

In this world, for you and me

But what CAN we do?

And what CAN we be?

The Joy of Bookmarks

I’m not talking about the kind you buy to put in a book to mark your place, I’m mostly talking about incidental bookmarks, the ones you grab to mark your place and often, these can be found in second hand books. You can find many things in second hand books, not just the authors work. I have found receipts posing as bookmarks, usually from the bookshop the book was bought from, sometimes train and bus tickets, shopping lists and even little notes, memos etc.

Then there’s this. It was just a piece of paper within the pages of a second hand book, which I believe was being used as a bookmark. It’s one of my favourites.

I have also found family photos and holiday postcards saying ‘the food is okay, but can’t wait to get back for some fish and chips, it just rained four days straight, but the night life and tequilas are great. Wish you were here!’
I usually leave those things in books. It’s as if those makeshift bookmarks belong there, the same goes for photos, notes and postcards, as long as they’re not incriminating of course, or have I.D info on them. I will remove and destroy pieces of paper and ‘incidental bookmarks’ that have too much info on them, like someone’s address for example.
Some ‘bookmarks’ are meant to stay within the book. You found them in the book so you keep them in the book. Sometimes they belong there. It’s nice just to pass it along to the next owner of the book. It’s a piece of the past that
connects the previous owners and readers of the book to the next and to the moment in time it’s being read. Bookmarks and incidental bookmarks can add to that whole wonder of second hand books.

The Joy of Books (Part Four)

So, as a child reading children’s books, I came across a lot of food and drink stains in the pages and other assorted debris.

I call them U.B.O’s, unidentified book objects

As an adult reading second hand books, things got a bit more savoury within the pages and I’m not talking about the authors viewpoint.

In this final part of The Joy of Books, I’d like to talk about hairgate.

I’ve had a couple of memorable instances regarding dubious looking hairs in books. When it happened the second time, it triggered me because it was almost an exact replica of the first time it happened, about twenty five years ago. The U.B.O’s both had a similar pattern of regularity with similar content.

I was reading a second hand book, of a sci fi genre, an omnibus, consisting of five books. It was a tome of a book and from the get go, quite frequently, between the pages, in the crease, was a long, thick, crinkly, wiry black hair. More hairs of exact colour and texture appeared throughout the book. I tried to ignore them at first and made sure that said hair did not slip out of the book onto my lap.

By the time I got to the third book in the omnibus, I was getting more and more repulsed but the hairs kept coming, and soon, after a bombardment of (what felt like) extreme porportions, I snapped, closed the book and slung it in the bin. Problem solved.

I didn’t want to put someone else through the same experience. I didn’t want to pass the book on as it was, yet, I also didn’t want to go through each page indvidually and somehow extract and dispose of said hairs because I was repulsed just by looking at them. Also, they were distracting. I was reading about iconic characters from a famous sci fi T.V series and all I can see are these hairs.

Had the book been in an orgy? What the hell had it been up to, to get so many hairs in it? My love for star Trek books wasn’t strong enough to endure the U.B.O’s.

I have had one other instance of this with an interlude of about 25 years. So, I think it’s quite an unusual occurence. I have read many second hand books, thus increasing the risk of more foreign objects inside, so the fact that I’ve only had two with a hair infestation is actually not that bad odds.

Illustration by Steve Young

The Joy of Books (Part Three)

The look of books

Aesthetics

Cover, size, look of print,size of print, font type

Light, medium or dark print

Colour and page environment

White page, off white, slightly yellowed, very yellowed

Dirty, mouldy, unidentified stains

Food, liquid, grease, sweat, other.

The cover of books?

I’ll let someone else cover the cover.

Books are meant to be shared

An old, well used paperback or hardback

is good as long as it’s clean

The odd elusive grease stain is acceptable

Can be ignored easily

But then, when we get into food stains

of the third kind

of the oily, damp, highly coloured

sticky kind

the ones that graduate to 3D status

by that, I mean actual food stuffs

Then, my will to ignore

becomes weak.

When I was growing up

the Childrens Library was the absolute worst

for undesirable and unidentifable stains in books.

The stains were mostly food and liquids

the ones I couldn’t stomach

were the green ones

They seemed to appear regularly on the pages

Maybe it was just once

and it traumatized me enough to think

it was just snot all the way

a terrible distraction from whatever I was reading

I had a slight germ phobia

so the children’s book, story and author

had less of an impact than those

slightly alien 3D luminous green things.

The bottom line is, I thought things would get better when I graduated to The Adult Library.

Then I discovered that books for adults were a whole other ball game. Quite literally.