‘I withdrew from places that are preoccupied with winning and losing.’
‘The Courage To Be Disliked’ – Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
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.
Quote of the Week
‘There was a lot I still had left to discover that night, when I was lost and felt God in the desert. But I knew that I wouldn’t let the darkness consume me. Even in the darkest night, you can still find so much light.’
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?
Quote of the Week
‘I kept writing, even when I didn’t want to, because I know writing is one of the few ways you can pull yourself out of whatever time you’re in.’
Quote of the Week
‘We’re all living in the aftermath of a cheese supper.’
Quote of the Week
‘After seeing one magpie, is there a time limit before you see the next one? If I see one at nine in the morning and the next one at five in the afternoon, is that two sorrows or one joy?’
Quote of the Week
‘When you insult or injure the unfortunate or the unhappy, you insult Christ Himself and He will not forget, for they are His Chosen ones.’
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
