Something Borrowed
I returned from my Saturday morning walk to the Marie Curie charity shop this morning, armed with a copy of the late Sir John Junor's memoirs and two VHS cartoon videos for the Zedettes. Having forked out just over three quid I would have been quite content to put my wallet back in the safe until the end of the month, but Mrs. Z had other ideas. We were all heading out to do some serious shopping. Apparently the family needed clothes, gifts, books, food, paint brushes and a proper sit-down lunch in a restaurant. I pointed out that, technically, we would be sitting down in the car if we went to a drive-thru. Then I ducked in time to dodge the car keys.
How we ended up in Easterhouse, I'm not quite sure, but there's that big new retail park just off the M8 now and that's where I dropped everyone while I went to the old Easterhouse shopping centre in search of the paint brushes. It has at least three of those everything-is-a-pound shops and I was able to buy a pack of five brushes for, yes, you're way ahead of me...
I also went upstairs to have a peek at the old public library where I used to spend so much of my time as a child. What would I have done without The Hardy Boys, Jennings and The Three Investigators? I wondered if those books were still on the shelves.
No chance.
The library had been transformed in to Learning Resource Centre and what was once the junior section was now bereft of books and filled with computer terminals. The other side of the building now held both adult and children's books but a quick scan of the shelves didn't reveal any of my old favourites. It was comforting to see the old volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica still stacked on a trolley against the librarian's office window, but I wondered if anyone ever opened them in these days of internet search engines.
Then I remembered a silly thing I used to do and I'm wondering if anyone else did this. If I looked at the date stamps on a library book and saw that no one had borrowed if for a while, I would start to feel sorry for the thing. I'd use one of my five tickets to check it out. How crazy is that? Mind you, I read all sorts of things I wouldn't usually have been interested in. Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat was one of them and a tedious book about Office Administration was another. To this day I remember the advice on how to open a letter using a proper letter opener and to shake the envelope "in case of enclosures".
Meanwhile it was time to rendezvous with the rest of the family for lunch and to ask, fearfully, why we needed the paint brushes.
