I love a good read!

You can tell a lot about people from the books they read. Not a half a mile away from us is Emmaus which is a second hand outlet set in an old Victorian railway station. The customers, and especially the people who work there could be characters in a book, but that's for another post!

In my efforts to de-clutter, I finally put the bin bag full of outgrown winter coats in the van and took them to Emmaus. As a young schoolgirl, I had a brief career working part-time in the Oxfam shop. The smell in Emmaus takes me back more years than I care to remember. Funny how second hand clothes and rejected household objects smell the same wherever you are in the world. Anyway, I digress - in those far back days, the manageress of the Oxfam shop was always less irritable if instead of just off-loading their junk, people took the time to buy something, so I always have a look round at the clothes in Emmaus and have had some real bargains in the past. They sell clothes BY WEIGHT, if you please, making it the cheapest place on the planet for kids' tee-shirts and even my denim skirt (the last thing I bought from there, only cost €1.20! I wear it a lot in the summer, more flattering than shorts at my age.

Anyway, this trip was a bit disappointing on the clothes front - they must have offloaded some stock to Haiti, since there was very litttle in the clothes section so I meandered over to the book area which is enormous. In the past, the English book section consisted of only three books including a Stanley Gibbons stamp directory from 1963 so I was very pleasantly surprised to find no fewer than three shelves devoted to English books.

Here is what I bought:

Your Talking Cat by Jack Richter
Men are from Mars ... by John Gray
End the Struggle and Dance with Life by Susan Jeffers
Websters New World Medical Dictionary (brand new, complete with CD!)
English Grammar in Use by Raymond Murphy (also brand new)
Bizzarre and Eccentric People by Nigel Blundell
Analyse your Dreams (also brand new)



Pineau's not remotely impressed by my bargain books!

For the princely sum of €3.75, these books have kept me happily entertained throughout the two weeks half term school holidays whilst the kids have commandeered the TV for the Wii and Dear Daughter (11) the computer. Note to self, must remind DD who the computer actually belongs to ... when I've finished this chapter!