The rest of yesterday

While having coffee with B yesterday afternoon, I released a couple of books in the cafe we were in: The Princely Flower by Garry Kilworth and The Return of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs. Of course I then had to explain to B all about Bookcrossing, and she offered me a couple of boxes of books to release! This is definitely a friendship to cultivate 😉

At 4pm, I went and met MrPloppy, and we decided to stay in town for dinner. MrPloppy needed to get a couple of books out of the library, so while he was looking for the ones he wanted I had a browse myself (I haven’t been to the library for ages, having a huge enough Mt TBR as it is!), and couldn’t resist taking out a couple of things: Finity by John Barnes, and an audiobook of The Cat Who Talked Turkey by Lilian Jackson Braun (why do I get the feeling I won’t be getting as much study done this weekend as I should?).

I needed to put some more money on my phone, so next we headed towards the post office. We passed the bank where lytteltonwitch works, which was shut, but as we walked past her office window I spotted her through a chink in the blinds, so I knocked on the window (nearly giving her a heart attack in the process, I think – sorry about that, L!) and she came out to talk to us. We invited her to join us for dinner once she’d finished her work, so we agreed to meet at Cafe Bleu in half an hour.

At the cafe, we were joking with the owner about not having piles of books on our table for a change (we go there for Bookcrossing meetups quite often, and he refers to us as “the book people”), when I spotted a book lying among the magazines on a nearby shelf. It turned out to be a bookcrossing book: Earthrace by Tom Keene, that Alithia had released 6 months before, and which had suddenly reappeared (it definitely hadn’t been in the cafe the last few times we were there). I’ve only caught a handful of books in the wild (though of course I’ve had hundreds of “controlled” catches, where people have given me books directly or I’ve found them in an OBCZ), so it was very exciting to find it, even though it’s probably not a book I’ll read. At least I can help it on its journey a bit.

After dinner, lytteltonwitch gave us a lift home so she could pick up the Cheat Book and Bill Bryson’s African Diary, which she’s taking to Adelaide for me (I’m not jealous, really I’m not jealous… I WANNA GO TO ADELAIDE TOO!!!!… ahem, sorry… I’m really really not jealous, honestly). I also gave her a tiny book I’d found while clearing out the bookshelves the other day, Piglet’s Little Book of Bravery, which will be a good size to go in a geocache.

Released a couple more books in the English department on my way to work this morning: The Rewrite Man by Bryan Forbes, and Investigating English Style by David Crystal and Derek Davy. I’m not hugely hopeful of getting journal entries on them, because I haven’t had a lot of luck at that release location, but they do always get picked up quickly, so I know they’re being appreciated by someone, at least (unless of course they’re languishing in a lost property box somewhere…)