Books baked well

BECT is a community trust that supports Bakewell and Eyam. They have a bus, and I saw it while watching rugby in a pub in Youlgreave (I'm naming no names as the regulars engaged in the dullest golf clubhouse chat ever). They need an extra, new bus.

To support their fundraising they opened a bookshop in Bakewell, the Book End, on Bridge Street. There's some nice titles, and it's freebie February so all books are three for the price of two. I came away with A Singular Man by JP Donleavy.

There were other bookshops in Bakewell, the eponymous Bakewell Bookshop (very nice range of books and sections for local authors and "set in Derbyshire") and a rather odd one that proclaimed itself open and locked the door. Seemingly this was a use of the word open that I am unfamiliar with.

JP Donleavy, A Singular Man
The Book End (BECT), Bridge House, Bridge Street, Bakewell, Derbyshire

Note: "It's only golf clubhouse banter, chat, jokes-". 

No, it's utter crap, it's men (predominantly) using language to create an Other they can be superior to. Yes, it's terrible your wife is having trouble getting a job due to her age, but it's even more terrible you said the French rugby player Mathieu Bastareaud was a gorilla (what, you thought none of the non-locals heard?). 

Equality does not work in unequal societies, the equality needed to support your wife is the same equality that does not look at Bastareaud and view him as a lesser human.

Not taking a Bath

I am not an expert on Dylan Thomas. You might name your favourite poem to me and I will be as unable to place it as you might my favourite lines from Under Milk Wood. So, it is with some excitement that I found a new-to-me title.

When I first saw it I didn't know it was Dylan Thomas. The spine just said Thomas and Davenport, and as such was just a curiosity that I had every intention of returning to the shelf when I had ascertained who had actually write the book, Who Killed The King's Canary?

A book that I would like to write is How Soon Should A Writer Update Their Second Edition? Herbert Read is a writer I am rather fond of, and in the same Oxfam Books in Matlock that I found Thomas I found Read's second edition of Contemporary British Art. The first edition  'came out six years after the second World War', so the revised second edition followed in the mid-to-late Sixties (it is packed in a bag somewhere and I can't check just yet). There are colour plates, and one of the black and white plates is of Peter Blake. I have so far not read Why Your Five Year-Old Could Not Have Done That, I assume it takes the more celebrating aspect of Read rather than the sneer of contemporary newspaper writers.

Two interesting reads to come.

Herbert Read, Contemporary British Art (2nd Edition), Dylan Thomas and John Davenport, The Death of the King's Canary
Oxfam Book, 70 Dale Road, Matlock, Derbyshire