I’m a huge book fan, as if Wifey. Obviously by that I mean I love reading, rather than I blow a cooling breeze upon books. Obviously. We has a garage extension which we grandiloquently call our Library, with all the capitalisation that a proper noun gets. My stuff is mostly fiction, including a typical boys collection of comics that I built up in a fit of escapist nostalgia when I was studying for my accountancy finals about ten years ago. Wifey has a lot of technical reference books that relate to field archaeology and the like. The room has about 8 Ikea Billy bookcases in it and most of them are double stacked. Hurrah for concrete foundations!
So when I read on Hotukdeals.com that the local Borders bookshop was closing and had 50% off everything, it was too good an opportunity to miss. I loaded the car up with children and set off.
On arrival I made my first mistake, I only put Fifi in the pushchair and let M’laddo walk with me. It turns out that in a fit of pique (presumably as they’re all going to be made redundant soon), the staff had done their best to mix up all the books. A PG Wodehouse might be next to a couple of books on nursing, which themselves might be next to a tome on historic erotica (didn’t buy that one after the Pirelli Calendar Christmas Fiasco), meaning that to find the required books (sewing, parenting and baby stuff), required looking at every book on every shelf. Whilst attempting to tell M’laddo that running off to play hide and seek was a really bad idea.
I also discovered that trying to browse books with a toddler on your shoulders and a puchair at hand, in the scrum of a closing down sale is blinking difficult.
Still, I got a few books out of it, which was nice.