It seems like a very, very long time ago ( time has warped) that I was busy bossing people around in the Oxfam bookshop, clearing out donations, looking for hidden treasures and reaching around another book sorter to put a pile of rejects into a plastic crate. Oh, those were the days….

But this weekend, we had a pop up village book swap/stall/get a new read event – and it was lovely.

I set up a WhatsApp group for our village of 70 households and someone put on a post asking for books for her mother.

That set me thinking that there must be other people looking for something to read, so I put a call out for people to donate books and leave them in our garage to disinfect.

With the benefit of Oxfam experience, and the knowledge that everyone sometime in lockdown has had a clear out, I said one bag of books per household…… I didn’t want a tsunami of books just a quality bubbling stream of good reads.

And in they came.

Mind you I was never sure that The Book of Sexual Disasters or Jeremy Clarkeson’s 4th book might fly off the ‘shelves’ and indeed they didn’t – maybe next time.

The weather was with us – so sandwiched in between cold and windy weather, we had a day of sun.

A neighbour leant us her long table, my best beloved went to Tescos to get banana boxes to display the books, and we stetted to set up.

People came and got books and chatted and swapped recommendations, and it was great to hear chatter around the yard – someone took a courgette plant I had been rearing and certainly don’t need, people waved from the lane, walked their dogs past us and stopped to take some books home.

I do realise this is a bucolic idyll blog and of course not everyone has that of a Sunday morning but one more nice story before I go.

So, one of the benefits of this horrible time is getting to know people I didn’t know, would never have met – we are a scattered hamlet – but now have and do.

I was delivering headbands – quite another story – on Saturday morning when I met up with  a couple and their dog.

She said she wasn’t coming for the book swap as she needed a book for her bookclub read which she was pretty sure we wouldn’t have.

‘Its called something like an impressive year,’ she said.

‘A Year Of Marvellous Ways?,’ I said.

‘Yes. That is it!’ she said.

‘I have it in the boot of my car,’ I said and gave it to her.

What was the chance of that….

This, dear reader, is my book of the lockdown.

And I have recommended it to six local people with very different reading habits and every one of them has loved it.

I don’t have one for you in the boot of my car, but I so recommend it 

Good reading whatever you are reading – but do go and find Marvellous, she is a real find.