finally shopping in the sales

When I got up this morning, and wound the bathroom blind up, it didn't look too bad out of the window.  Grey, yes, but I thought that maybe the rain that was forecast yesterday evening hadn't made it this far east.  Going out to let the chickens into their run, I discovered that I was mistaken.  It was raining, a gentle steady silt of water, the sort of rain that if you were to dash outside for a minute you could deceive yourself into thinking that it was nothing much, but if you were to work in it for half an hour you would be soaked.

At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting.  It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold.  I think it's OK.  The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down.  The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them.  They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that.  I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.

Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery.  In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50.  I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap.  I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then.  I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived.  I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).

It was still raining.  I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list.  I always keep a long list.  It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose.  Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again.  Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff.  There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner.  I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine.  After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong.  Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.

It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me.  I still like them.  Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead.  And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it.  But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets).  As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No.  I like the sleeve notes.  I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.

It's still raining.  There's no more to be said.

bookish pleasures

Last night I managed to do something I've never done before, and delete the task bar from my laptop.  This mystified the Systems Administrator, who asked what on earth I'd been doing, and I said nothing except try to open Windows Explorer.  The SA had to resort to the nuclear option of temporarily removing the battery.  The SA is not a fan of Windows 7.  One friend who is a Mac user says we should convert, but I couldn't face the hassle, unless I had to.

What I was trying to do was get into Amazon to buy something for my Kindle.  I was given the Kindle in the autumn for my birthday, and was thrilled with it (when the bewildered eastern European delivery driver finally managed to find our house), but the other books I was given at the same time kept me going until December, and the SA and I have a pact not to buy ourselves books in the run up to birthdays and Christmas, so once I'd finished Andrew Rawnsley's history of the last years of the Labour government on the Kindle I didn't like to get anything else.

I did download some poetry, some free and some very cheap.  Cheap poetry on Kindle turned out not to be a good idea, as the budget edition of the poems and prose of Ernest Dowson dispensed with the lines in the poetry and ran each verse together into a single paragraph.  I think that is down to inappropriate use of text recognition software, as distinct from scanning images into electronic book form.

Amazon are missing a trick when it comes to sales for Kindles, though I dare say they are working on it, because it still doesn't seem to be possible to buy a download as a present for somebody else.  A download purchased on my Amazon account is directed to my Kindle, and I can't find any option to present it to another person instead.  Amazon will let you print or e-mail gift certificates, and being able to do the same thing for an electronic book should be the next logical step.  True, you rob the recipient of the pleasure of choice compared to a gift certificate, but that's the case when you give a physical book, and part of the fun of giving and receiving books is hitting the right note, thus demonstrating how carefully you have observed and understood your loved one's tastes.

I decided to follow up the Andrew Rawnsley with Alistair Darling's memoirs.  Poor Alistair Darling, I don't think he has made it big time in the political biography stakes, as Back from the Brink is already down to £2.09 as an e-book.  The SA would like to read that as well at some point, and another area where Amazon ought to up their game with Kindles is that there needs to be a way of lending e-books other than by lending the reading device.  The SA and I share quite a few of our books, or at least we do in some subjects.  History, politics, food and some aspects of urban design are joint enthusiasms, though I won't be clamouring to borrow The Kronstadt Revolution when the SA's finished it, and the SA's familiarity with my gardening books stops at checking the covers very carefully to see which ones I've already got.  There was a new history of East London that we both eyed up and neither bought, in case the other did, and a book about skyscrapers that the SA thought about buying for me but felt embarrassed that it might really be a present to self.  The covering phrase when presenting a parcel of probable mutual interest is 'this is a bit of a present for both of us'.

Addendum  A late straggling Christmas card arrived this morning.  From the annotations on the envelope we gathered it had reached us via another house, whose occupants had kindly bothered to stick it back in the post with a note saying it wasn't theirs.  Our predecessors  probably thought the name they chose for this house was very appropriate and charming.  It is appropriate, though a bit naff, and it is unfortunate that there are at least two other houses with the same name in nearby villages.  Add in the English tendency to name a road after the place it goes to, and there's ample scope for confusion.  I was slightly indignant the card went astray as it had our full postcode on the envelope, but looking at that carefully I though the sender had probably written H as U.

shopping for books

I wasn't going to write again about shopping so soon.  I was going to write about how I have planted the Colchicum bulbs that arrived last week without chopping lumps out of any of the other bulbs which are planted there already, which is a minor triumph.  And how the Robinia hispida has flopped all over the lawn, and I forgot to buy any stakes when I was at the garden centre, after my trip to the dump (aka tip, aka household recycling centre), which has got a new member of staff who looks disconcertingly like Ronnie Barker (have you noticed how things are disconcerting, but concerted?).

Then I read a few pages of the Telegraph website while drinking a mug of tea and digesting my lunch, and found another wail about independent bookshop closures.  It is not a very well informed complaint, since the savings on Amazon are not a matter of saving 10p as the author says in her article, but of paying between 30 and 50% less.  And it's just silly to say that an independent bookshop is the last place where you can talk to strangers without resorting to dating websites.  I talk to lots of strangers every time I go to work (OK, that is at an independent retailer, albeit not a bookseller).  If they look as though they might appreciate it, I even recite bits of poetry to them.  Or if you want to talk to strangers you can join a club or society for something you're interested in.  I talked to several strangers at the wildlife fair last week.  One of the silliest reasons given for keeping post offices open (there are many good reasons) was that queueing in the post office was one of the only times in the week that some old people got to talk to someone.  If that is true, it is an urgent reason for making proper social provision for old people, not for forcing the Systems Administrator to go and queue in the post office to to insure the van, instead of taking the preferred option of buying a tax disc over the internet.

But the really ignorant bit of Ms. Caplan's article is when she says that Amazon can't recommend what you should read next, and for that you need a real person.  Sorry Nina, but Amazon's algorithms are incredibly powerful.  It tracks your purchasing history for ever, and it identifies what else other people with similar purchasing patterns bought, and it makes a very good job of it.  Sometimes it comes up with titles by authors I know and like, and sometimes by authors I don't know.  The great majority of the time, when I check those out in the review pages of the broadsheets or hear about them on R4, they review well, and when I get round to reading some of them I generally like them.  The Amazon readers' reviews are also very useful.  I don't necessarily accept their conclusions, but they give a strong pointer to what kind of book it is, and I can decide for myself if I think I'd like that sort of thing.

On the strength of my having bought a lot of Roger Deakin, Amazon told me that I might like Caught by the River, a series of essays about about rivers (link to Amazon here).  When my mum asked me what I would like for Christmas, I suggested that, and she kindly bought it for me.  Being a staunch supporter of her local independent bookshop (and reluctant to put her card details online), she ordered it from her friendly local bookshop.  When she collected it, she had a conversation with the friendly local bookshop owner, who said it looked interesting and she might order another copy for the bookshop.  Er, excuse me.  You are meant to be providing your customers with ideas of things they might like, not cribbing ideas for good new titles from the Great Satan Amazon.  Caught by the River is a lovely book, by the way, and I heartily recommend it.  I liked it so much I even ended up buying a print from the man who did some of the illustrations (over the internet, naturally enough).

I'm glad I've got that off my chest, and now I shall go and pull up some more weeds.