Books

Kites,Crows,Owls and Oxfam

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Well if it isn’t lambs it is birds as they might say in Deepest Sussex – if we knew anyone who was actually originated from Deepest Sussex.

We have a pair of kites living round here – no longer as rare as they were – but still a delight to watch soaring and sweeping around the back field.

They are not, in case you are not familiar with kites, small birds. Indeed the dog can look quite anxious and prey-like in certain lights.

But it is interesting to watch the corvids/crows/ravens mob them.

I should be more accurate on what type of corvids they are being a big fan of the book by Mark Cocker called ‘Crow Country.’

Amongst other fascinating stuff about corvids, It tells of the difference between crows and other corvids and explains that saying ‘if your see some ravens they are crows and if you see one crow it is a raven’ – or perhaps it is the other way round …..no, actually crows are sociable.

Anyway, these big kites are circling around looking for prey and out of the woods come the corvids and mob them – swooping around and chasing them off so the ‘poor’ kites heads off for the Downs.

The corvids are half the size of the kites but are quite determined and the kites seem either to be saying, ‘Bloody hell, is it harassment or what?’ or ‘Darling, shall we swoop up to the Downs and circle lazily round there and leave these rather plebeian types to their own thing?’

Whilst on the subject of predators, there is, what I think, is an owl box on one of our trees.

When I say ‘our’, I just mean trees we think of as ours in that they are on our horizon and are the two trees on the top of this blog – of course in fact, they are our landowner’s.

I am sure he knows what he is doing, and maybe the owls like a clear view of the catchment as it were – certainly it is not disguised or protected in any way and, as we say when one of us is washing up, ‘ don’t you think darling, it spoils the look of the tree?’

Remind me to tell you one day of the expensive bird box we put up which had been assiduously ignored by our birds who have then built their nests – insultingly – in the foliage alongside it.

Anyway, the Oxfam bookshop was open on Good Friday only from 10 till 3 so it was short shifts all round -and Joan was on the till in the morning, and I was on in the afternoon.

I had found a lovely book dating from 1941 which was sketches of children and although it was only worth about £3, I thought it was lovely enough to try it at £9.99.

Now Joan and I have a habit of me setting her a book-selling challenge on her shift. A big old bible ( but we had sold those before Easter), a Complete History of Fishing etc etc.

Essentially books I can’t find a place for anywhere else – I leave them on the counter and challenge Joan to sell them.

She looked at the book and although not usually a bibliophile, she was enchanted. That made me up the price to £12.99, and set her the challenge to sell it whilst I was out doing some errands.

In our cabinet – for expensive books (and vinyl as we now call records), was a set of three books called The Birds of Sussex.

(Should there ever be an avid reader of this blog with a good memory, they might recall than I found two of the the three volumes, which of course means they are worth a lot less, and then discovered the third volume under a pile of other stuff.)

Anyway, these books with gorgeous illustrations and I do mean gorgeous, had been in the cabinet for months and months. I was occasionally thinking of culling them and buying them to take home as they are so gorgeous – did I mention before how lovely they were ?

Anyway, (again) I got back from my errands, to find Joan in a high humour.

She had sold the book of children’s sketches – and sold The Birds of Sussex for a princely £100.

Because we were having a short day, I suggested we did not need to cash up once at lunchtime and then again at the end of the day as we usually do, but instead we could carry on through.

‘Oh not on your life,’ said Joan. ‘I am going to get the reading for this shift. You, Lucy, can eat my dust.’

And indeed I did.

I had a nice short shift with good weather and a holiday mood making customers smiley and generous, but no Sussex Birds for me.

The Night Manger and the Cold War

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I would like to suggest that we spend all day on productive, useful, creative activities and then have something for supper made from some organic veg box – and across the dinner table we discuss Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the finer passages of the Iliad.

But actually, we have supper in front of the telly more times than not – and that can be re-runs of Lewis if one of us has had a particularly hard day, or recordings of what is making the ‘culture’ news.( And we don’t have an organic veg box delivered.)

And recently, like everyone else ( or at least everyone else like us,) it has been Happy Valley and The Night Manager.

We are of an age to have read John Le Carre avidly as ‘young people ‘ and to still enjoy a ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ‘ DVD with Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

I was raised in the Cold War and those stories seemed all too believable. I still like them. In our recent cull of some of our books (we still have many, many, left) all the John Le Carre were protected as they will be re-read.

(Now, I could do a list of books that I will always want to lay my hands on when a current book is finished/boring, I have a stinking cold and need to be tucked up with a good book or things are bad and I need to be sure my book will be escapism of the best order – but that is for another time.)

Some young person came in the Oxfam shop the other day and asked for any John Le Carre as she had seen The Night Manager and wanted more. Sadly, we didn’t have any, but I explained (in great detail) which she should read and why. She backed out of the shop, nervously…

My favourite is still The Little Drummer Girl which is about a young woman who is ‘recruited’ both by Mossad and the Palestinians and is pulled in one direction and then the other.

Surely, it would make for an excellent follow up to The Night Manager but international political sensitivities, or put it another way, the Israeli sensitivities, might put paid to that.

But, it was the Cold War spy stuff which resonated from my youth when I visited Berlin.

What I expected were steamy cafe windows with unshaven men looking unhappy or furtive and passing slips of paper or a few words between them, and eating hurriedly.

Sadly, I didn’t make it there until after the wall was well and truly down – and so what I found was more or less a city like any other European capital.

My friend, who is German, and I visited the Jewish memorial at dusk and found it eerie and impressive – lots of narrow tunnels between blocks which look like raised graves and it is a brilliant, thought-provoking place to be.

But of steamy cafes, there were none.

She was too young, too German ( as in, not raised on British spy novels) and too pleased to see a united Berlin, to understand my disappointment.

Since then, I have been back and now can see signs of the old left in the new. Berlin is a really big city with no real historic centre and lots of areas in which you can see signs of whether they were east or west, American, Russian or British – just about.

And the flea market in Berlin had lots of shadows of the older Berlin. (I bought a very welcome sheepskin coat which was very welcome when I was walking the very long distances between a and b which you find out about in Berlin.)

But back to the time when John Le Carre was writing the first stuff and I was young, and it was the Cold War.

We had a very real feeing that nuclear war could break out at any time.

I am too young to remember the Bay of Pigs and the brinkmanship around that, but I do remember growing up with the feeling that this issue was live and it only took someone nervous or mad to spark off a nuclear holocaust.

I clearly remember going on holiday to Cornwall and before we left there was some issue – I forget what – between the USSR and the Americans.

This was in the day, of course, of no mobile phones and, indeed, in that place there was no phone, tv or radio – we were cut off from news.

I was walking on the coastal path and thinking – as we did in those days – do you want to try and survive a nuclear fallout or do you want to to be killed by the first bomb. I always came to the decision, the first bomb.

There was a television series at that time about survivors of the nuclear holocaust and part of it was filmed where I grew up in Malvern – I remember the station being a location.

And for people of our age, if you are lucky, you can still catch The Day of the Triffids on Radio 4 Extra. Now, I know that is not a nuclear war story as such but the aftermath story is very similar.

But we, like John Le Carre, have moved on to issues which now face us and the next generation after us have no points of reference to the Cold War.

The Night Manager could start me on a riff about BAE systems ( but that is for another day.)

 

 

 

 

Drought and Uncertainty

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Usually I am complaining in a rather martyred way about the amount of books I am clearing every shift at Oxfam, making it quite clear that there is a never ending flood of books that only I am holding back from swamping the shop.

Well, dear reader, it is course not just me by a long chalk – and what is more, at this moment, the flood has turned into a drought.

So, out the back of the shop where we pile the sacks for recycling it is usually just this side of chaos – this week was clear, blank, empty – even, hoovered!

I am not sure what to do with myself if truth be told. Usually whilst sorting books I am complaining ( in a rather martyred way) that I could get on with all sorts of other things to make our shop even more successful if only I didn’t have to empty another ten boxes of books.

But, I have sold the latest collection of erotica to the second-hand bookshop – Oxfam frowns on the idea of selling sex in the shops.

I have put the hobbies and crafts into order – now embroidery books are next to knitting, well away from DIY in a retro/pre-feminist move – and all the books you would ever, ever need to learn how to paint or draw are sitting with each other.

Religion has been sorted into world religions ( in groups, starting with Buddhism and moving alphabetically onwards) with all and sundry other stuff about crystals and angels and spaceship visitations attached on the end of the shelf.

(One day someone is going to buy the massive tome on Dreams and Their Interpretations. I think it may have been around in the shop, one way or another, longer than I have.

Occasionally, I find someone has moved it to the Academic section and, although it protests, I insist on moving it back to Esoteric.)

I have re-ordered the Old & Interesting into blocks of colour – all the blue books, the green books etc etc.

And every time you change the shelves – update, juggle, fiddle, change the front-facing books, you always get more interest in them.

There were two books – dating from the 1960s – about hunting in junk shops.

They have been out on the shelves for months and I was just about the cull them – short as we are of books, standards need to be maintained, or at least upheld more or less  and anyway, they didn’t find my colour-coding plan – when a customer fell upon them with delight. At £1 each she had a bargain and another two books were rescued from the recycling fate.

Someone came in looking for an ‘interesting’ golf book for her son. (Now to my mind there are very few interesting golf books – and all of those were written by P G Wodehouse.)

But such is the drought, that we had none – we who are usually knee deep in golf and cricket books – had none.

After a bit of thought, I persuaded her that a much better idea was the lovely (and it was lovely) hip-flask with St Andrew’s etched on it. Luckily, that was £7.99 of hip flask rather than the usual £2.49 of ‘how to improve your swing’ book.

Upstairs, my stock of book collections is also looking thin.

We still have the box on heraldry and chivalry – based on a generous donation of heraldry books supplemented with anything I can find with a knight on the front.

But we need a centrepiece for the window to go with it, and no one I asked had a suit of armour within their reach….

We have a plan to do a window on the birds and the bees ( no, not a way to sneak in sex) using a few of the lovely bee palaces my fellow volunteer sells. (www.beepalace.com)

But we are short on bee books. Bird books, even lovely ones, are two a penny but there is a shortage, not just of bees, but bee books.

We might have to broaden it out to pollinators and include butterfly books, bat books -hummingbird books at a pinch. But birds and pollinators does not have the same ring to it.

Our manager reckons it is uncertainty about the EU referendum which is causing this drought of donations.

I’m sure in the corridors of power, they are talking about the influence of uncertainty in the referendum, but I bet they are not taking the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield into account.

A Couple of Curiosities

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There was the usual in-flow of books today.

Thursday, as I may have said before, is the day when a surprising number of people decide to have a clear out and then bring in boxes and bags, and more boxes of books.

I have no idea why Thursday is the day – and of course there are other donations on other days, but Thursday is never without a lot of book sorting.

So despite the fact, always the optimist, I had a list of interesting other things planned, I spent the afternoon sorting.

Among the boxes – did I mention there were a lot of them? – I found a few little treasures.

None of them worth anything much in case you were getting excited at the prospect of a great find.

One had the marvellous title of ‘From the Romans to B&Q – a history of Wyberton’ I take my hat off to the local historians who came up with that. (They do live in Lincolnshire….)

And then there was the lovely art nouveau cover of a travel/photography book on the Norfolk Broads.

And finally, I found a diary from 1946 in which someone had almost filled with his (I am guessing from the handwriting it was a he, but I could be wrong,) translation of words from Beowulf into modern English.

And there was a notebook with more words translated.

These have no monetary value whatsoever but it was very nice handling them and knowing that someone had spent hours and hours working through Beowulf.

Perhaps,he was a Beowulf scholar and came up with a great modern English version.

I will never know, but I couldn’t bring myself to put them in the re-cycling sack.

So, just as someone must have been clearing out their parent’s home and decided to get rid of these old notebooks, no doubt someone will find them when they clear out my stuff – so one day they will end up in a sack but not tonight.

IMG_1718 IMG_1719 IMG_1720

Medals II

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

For anyone who read the previous piece about the cap badge, here is a quick update.

I wrote up the badge’s regimental history and also some blurb to go with the rifle medal and the WRVS medal and decided to put them at the centre of a display of military history books. (Always a good seller in our shop  –  I may have mentioned we are knee deep in retired naval officers.)

I happened to be on the till that afternoon and so could see that the medals in the window had lots of people stopping to look and read. So, I gave myself a small pat on the back and tried not to look too delighted.

Then a woman came in and bought a card and, as she left she stopped to look at the medals, and then came back in.

It turned out her uncle had been in the Rifles regiment but only at the end of WWI. He had been in the Salvation Army so, though not a full conscientious objector, had been a cook behind the lines – and driven an ambulance I think.

But as the war drew to a close and every man was said to be needed at the front, he was given a gun, no training and sent out.

He was killed a week before the armistice.

This woman’s daughter had researched a whole lot of stuff about him and the war and had collected some memorabilia, but had never had a cap badge – now she has.

PS. The rifle medal sold too but I have no idea who to, and why anyone would want it.

It left the military history display lacking a certain something, so yesterday we changed it to a table full of crafts and hobbies books – who would have thought one shop needed four books on origami?

Oxfam Medals

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

As every second household in Petersfield and the surrounding area seems to have spent the summer clearing their bookshelves, we have had an avalanche (or tsunami depending on your preference for natural disaster metaphors) of books into the shop.

Needless to say they were not all of the highest quality so a lot, a very lot, of sacks have been filled and stay piled up in the back room until the strong young man comes to collect them on a Friday.

But enough of all that – I certainly have had recently.

Donated last week were a couple of medals, one a Women’s Voluntary Service medal from the second world war and, another which says it was presented by the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs ( a very small clubhouse or a very small gun – who knows?)

And we had a tin cap-badge which had ‘Peninsular’ on it and we thought was from the Peninsular War.

The best beloved did a bit of research into the cap badge and found that the regimental museum was in Winchester – a hop and skip away.

On Saturday we decided in a rather spur of the moment, raffish way, to go to this museum and see what we could find out about the badge.

It is a very nice museum – given that it is all about war – and there is an amazing model of the Battle of Waterloo, but also had on its premises, the curator – which was a real bonus.

So we got to find out that it was not a cap badge from the Peninsular War but a later one and worth not much at all – we hadn’t had big hopes on that score so not a disappointment.

And now we have its history, I am planning to have a display of military history books with the medals and their backgrounds on the shop table.

So, are we Oxfam volunteers so easily delighted.

(Should you be interested in the Rifle medal here is what I found out http://www.rifleman.org.uk/Society_of_Miniature_Rifle_Clubs.htm)

IMG_1708

Boxes

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

We have an old table in the front of the bookshop, and each week I change the display.

When we first had it, we just used it to show off particularly nice books but then I got it into my mind that we should have a theme.

My volunteer colleague does a fab job with the window – all sorts of displays and props but you would be surprised how many books it takes to do a good window display.

We don’t usually have enough books (well, good looking books,) to do the same table and window theme.

So, I started doing collections of books for the table.

Now the upstairs of the shop is scattered with random boxes of my collections. ‘Lucy’s boxes’ as they are known – when they are not being moved or cursed for being a trip hazard, in the way of getting to the clothes shelves……

The most popular books are good art books.

Once, and stop me if I have told this story before, we got a call from someone saying she was clearing out her parents’ home and there were a lot of art books which her parents had specified were to go to Oxfam. Could she get them delivered the next day?

They came in about 20 large black sacks and my heart sank. Black sacks usually denote books which (sadly) get moved from black sacks into our white re-cycling sacks. (We did get them gift-aided in any case.)

But no, one peer into the sacks and you could see these were just lovely, expensive, coffee table, and unusual art books.

We did very well indeed in sales from the table that week.

But most of our collections are gradually built after one or two books will spark an idea.

Of course, there was the First World War box which was slowly filled over nearly a year to get a really good display on the anniversary of the break out of war.

Then there was the rather obscure box of farming books that started with a donation from some gentleman farmer of certain years.

Included in that was a book on the history of the Ivel tractor. Yesterday, I took a call from a man who asked if we still had it because he had seen it and not bought it, been kicking himself ever since and now would come hot foot to buy it.

It had gone. And that is the way with charity shops, see it and buy it because if you don’t, it might never come in again.

We had a box for National Women’s Day – but I got the date wrong on the notices, thinking that it was the same day every year and infact it was three days later….

Last winter, we did a collection of ghost stories and you could buy a mug for 50p with every ghost story you bought.

We’ve currently got a box on the go about Time that started with a several books on clocks and The Time Traveller’s Wife, and is slowly building up nicely.

There is one on philosophy (not sure that is going to be a big seller,) and another on poetry (you can’t tell with poetry, sometimes it sells well and other times the books can sit there, looking sad, for ages.)

There is a box on landscape and maps. Maps, especially old and local ones are always popular and we had a donation of old London underground maps and an old book on routes across England with little contour maps, so I started a box.

And I’ve got two boxes of ‘old and interesting’ books that are all priced at £1. It turns the shop into a jumble sale for a few days but people love getting a bit of history for £1.

On the table as I write, is a collection of music books. The Annie Liebovitz coffee table book of photographs of musicians sold as I was just putting it out.

And the lovely Peter Rabbit Music Book, (that I found at the bottom of a pile of piano books for grades one to six dating from the 1980s and destined for a white sack, sorry), is worth about £20 and hopefully will be sold before I’m next in the shop on Monday.

I have an idea for a box on Speed – racing cars, steam engines, Jamie’s Meals in 15 minutes……

IMG_1483

Snapshots of an Oxfam Bookshop

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

Today I was doing a full day in the bookshop – mostly you do mornings or afternoons – but today it was a full day, and I had plans.

Upstairs (the behind-the-scenes bit,) I intended to sort out the history shelves, sort out my boxes of specialist books – but more of that later – cull and re-stock the old and interesting, all sorts of things – and then in the afternoon I was downstairs in the shop.

Downstairs, you can do all sorts of stuff whilst the book-buying public has better things to do than be in your shop.

You can put gift aid stickers on books (with gift aid the government gives us an extra 25%) and price them so that they can go upstairs and some fellow book-elf can put them on the upstairs shelves ready and waiting to be called into the bookshop proper.

You can price some books and put them straight into the shop without them ever having to stay, waiting, upstairs.

You can look at the mess that is the literature shelves and get them standing upright, in order and smiling at the world.

And, and this is my real campaign at the moment, you can do something interesting with the front-facing books.

For those of you who don’t know what that means (and neither did I,) it is those books that are propped up and facing you.

Sometimes, I chose those that are red and so the shop has books with (largely) red covers facing front; sometimes I chose faces so that every category has a face looking out at you – from biography to animals to literature to children’s’ books. (It is a lot harder with old and interesting which rarely have any interesting cover at all, and as for humour you are on a looser.)

And then when the ‘public’ come in, you can find them something they are looking for, or just listen to their stories of why they are delighted to find that particular book.

But the book-donating public of Petersfield changes all your plans because you have to deal with what they bring in.

A nice older person rang this morning and said she wanted to donate a few boxes of books – about four boxes she said.

So I spent the morning clearing the other donations to make sure that we had room to take these boxes and that I would manage to sort them so that tomorrow – when there are no book sorters in the shop – it would be clear.

In the meantime, I had persuaded my (very) nice new friend who helped me so much with the bookstall for the village festivities, to think about being an Oxfam bookshop volunteer and managed to get him in for a look around.

“It’s not rocket science,” I said, as I whizzed him around the vaguely organized chaos. My fingers were so crossed he would say yes and he would understand that it was an interesting place to work and not, please god, not get appalled by the chaos we work in.

He didn’t seem appalled and I hope he will be as interested as I am.

So, back to the day.

We have an endless supply (as in donations of books on various aspects of the countryside) from bird books to flowers to every aspect of the natural world.

A woman came in asking for a simple guide to wildflowers and I confidently said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Leading her to the relevant section, I knew we would have lots of books on wildflowers, but we didn’t.

Startled, I rang upstairs and asked my fellow volunteer for wildflower books waiting upstairs to be given their moment on the shelves downstairs.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘We will have lots.’

But we didn’t.

I asked her to give me her phone number and we would keep an eye out but she said not to worry she would pop in – and look elsewhere.

And then, when I was sorting out the children’s non-fiction, there was this lovely book on wildflowers.

Blow me, as they say, an hour later another woman asked if we had any books on identifying flowers.

That has never happened before. No one ever asks for wildflower books when we are knee deep in them.

So, I was pleased to be able to march her over and show her this book.

But she said,’ No I want something not so simple.’

I have her number.

So, do you remember the person who rang saying she had four boxes?

She had her fiend/neighbour/relative bring them in and she had a lot more than four boxes.

I said to the neighbour/friend/relative,’ I though there were four boxes.’ ‘Only if they were four body big boxes,’ he said.

I am sorry to say that most of those books needed putting in re-cycling sacks.

They were brown, they were Guinness Book of Records 1996, you may think I was being heartless, but I know what we can sell and what we can’t.

Ten minutes later someone else donated, and wanted their bags back, so seven large bags of books had to be put into other boxes. Three other people brought in books, and so on and so on.

This is now 4.30 and we shut at 5pm – and by now I have, among the other things I have done today, filled 30 re-cycling sacks.

I am sure that today I sacked for re-cycling a book about which someone   would say,’ Hey don’t throw that away, it is great.’

And, if you have got this far, I will tell you about the boxes next time.

Parallels

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

There are some surprising parallels between our village life and world politics.

A friend of mine is involved in a village society where the leadership is not in its first flush of youth – but then most of us aren’t.

Anyway, they are looking for the next generation of leadership and my friend, who may be in the running for a (small) leadership role, said it was like being groomed by ISIS.

You are contacted, flattered, people keep in touch with you, you are told that the rewards are great and that you will be doing this for a great cause – and of course you are vetted.

As far as I know you don’t have to travel to Syria or take up arms and very little is done via any form of social media – and the people involved do not wear masks – at least not yet.

I hesitate to say you have to bring cakes – preferably baked by yourself – but for all I know, ISIS has the same rules.

And then there is the coup.

In our case, the leadership of a village institution was said to be rather undemocratic.

(Please bear with me on this rather vague stuff about who is who and what is what, but rather to my surprise some people in the village are reading this blog so I have to be careful or there will be people on my back step with angry faces – remind me to tell you sometime of my best- beloved angering Israel and then Mosad arriving on the back step – though I am not drawing parallels of course.)

Anyway, the village institution was said to be rather undemocratic and ‘things needed to be done!’

The leader was told that ‘things’ were afoot and he graciously stood aside.

On the night, a member of the institution was briefed to nominate a person as second in command, the vice-chair or president or whatever it was.

Unfortunately that person had a senior moment and instead of nominating the person waiting the in the wings to take over, she nominated someone with a vaguely similar name who was shocked and surprised to find himself carried aloft to his new role.

Now he is rather harassed by the previous incumbent’s emails on what he should and shouldn’t do.

I will bet there is many a vice-president of a small African nation who finds himself in a not too dissimilar position.

Finally, a rant, though this is pure village stuff and has no parallels.

As, dear reader, you will recall, we ran the village Festivities bookshop with a few great people and a round up of locals from the pub.

(I’m not sure I mentioned it, but I will now. By the weekend of the Festivities we had got 91 banana boxes to one place in the village but they had to be moved to the final destination. I was not sure we would have enough muscle so on our usual Friday evening visit to the pub, I went round everyone who looked ‘likely’ and asked if they would come the next morning to shift a load of books. One great person got her Dad’s large trolley and other people carried boxes and all were shifted in just over an hour – thank you!)

Well, in a recent parish magazine, there was a severe complaint from a person who is quite practiced at severe complaints, about the fact there were not enough people stepping up to the plate on village committees.

Now, though I don’t get involved, I hear that this really means, “ We people of certain standing want some of you lot to come and get on with the drudge stuff (and bake cakes) whilst we, people of a certain standing, make the decisions. And one day, one day mind you, you can take over as long as you are groomed and listen attentively to how it should be done.’

I’m minded to put a bit in the parish magazine reminding the severe woman that not only did the bookstall – with no committee – raise £1,000 but that the vibrant, fun and very successful Choir Called Dave runs without any vice-anythings or a committee of any sort.

Strange Fruit

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I was listening to a great Radio 4 programme the other day called Soul Music.

The series takes a piece of music and finds people (god only knows how they do the research) who can talk about why it means something significant to them.

Anyway, this was about Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holliday.

I was sitting at my kitchen table but it took me straight back to driving up the A1 on a sunny evening, watching hot air balloons fly over the crops.

There is something about some music that just takes you back to where, and it has to be where, you heard it last or it made an impression on you.

If you don’t know it, Strange Fruit is about lynching in America.

Yes, it’s shocking.

You should listen to it, great programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jb1w1

It got me fiddling around on Google and Wikipedia as you do when the risotto does not need your immediate attention…..

In 1916 in Waco – a city then thought to be progressive but since well known for anything but progressiveness – a young black man called Jessie Washington pleaded guilty to the rape of a white woman.

He was quickly sentenced to death in a courtroom full of furious locals.

He was straight away dragged from the courtroom and lynched in front of the town hall.

10,000 people watched including local officials, police, children and people on their lunch-break.

A professional photographer was there and it was his images which helped change views on lynching.

See the images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington

Some five years later in 1921 Leonadis C Dyer from St Louis sponsored an anti-lynching bill which was passed by the House of Representatives, but a Senate filibuster by white Democrats blocked it and defeated it.

As they did for several years to come.

Meanwhile there were many lynchings of young black men.

In 1964, three Mississippi civil rights workers were abducted and lynched.

But the murder, including hanging from a tree, by two Klu Klux Klan members, of Michael Donald is though to be the last recorded lynching.

It was in 1981.

God knows we Brits have a lot to answer for but at least we don’t claim we are the Land of the Free.

This all got me thinking about one of the best books I have ever read.

It is called Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene.

It is about a civil rights ‘campaign’ (and I put that in quotation marks because it was a local action rather than a big campaign.)

Here is the blurb from the back of the book,

‘Set in the Deep South of the 1970s, this superb book tells the true story of the political awakening of a tiny black community. Here the people of McIntosh County, Georgia tell of their own experiences – stories that are outrageous, funny, eloquent and touching – in a historic struggle for civil equality.’

I remember reading it for the first time, years ago, and having to remind myself that this was in the 70s.

Not in the 20s or 30s or even 40s – but in the 70s when I was listening to Rod Stewart.

( Of course, I had leant my copy – and several later-bought copies – and couldn’t find one so I had to buy it again…)

I think it is now out of print but you can get it via www.bookfinder.com and I urge you to read it.

It is brilliant and moving.