Brexit

The Timing of Books (and Brexit)

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There are times in ( I assume) any Oxfam bookshop when things are less than entrancing. 

The teetering pile of unsorted books topped with a Jeremy Clarkson or two, just for example.

Or souvenir books of royal weddings past, or scrawled-in children’s books, or sudoko books with some of them half done, or the complete works of Georgette Heyer damp and very brown

I could go on but don’t want to sound ungrateful  – though there are days when gratitude is a little thinly spread.

And there are days when the work, the slog, the efforts, the imagination and planning, when the whole making-the shop look good is not met with much, or indeed any appreciation, but don’t get me started on that.

But on other days we get such little delights that it makes it all worthwhile and I will entice you to read on with the promise that I will include a little delight or two at the end.

Meanwhile there is an issue of timing

Some books are time-specific.

The huge old bible we were given is a bit ramshackle but it has whatever the bookshop equivalent of kerb-appeal may be. But finding it in a pile of unsorted books on Easter Monday doesn’t quite work. ( We only do religion once a year…and I had just cleared the religion table display.)

The 51 copies of the magazine The Great War, I Was There! have arrived just too late. The four year leading up to 2018 was their moment and now it is gone. The World War II anniversaries are just gearing up. 

Anyway, the jolly exclamation mark made me wince a bit…

There is already a shelf or indeed two of Christmas books waiting for their turn.

And oddly for a bookshop, we have had a donation of a good number of sunglasses. 

So, I have to monitor the weather forecast and work out what books would work with sunglasses.

Do we go for light summer reads, books with sun in their title ( fewer than you might think), celeb autobiographies so we can put a pair on Johnny Depp’s or Bridgit Bardot’s but that might take several year’s to get together – you can’t order donated books.

But today I found a book that had its day in 1938 and now, reading its preface, seems so prescient.


Now if that isn’t a Brexit warning, I don’t know what is. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg tells us that Brexit will deliver cheaper footwear – did anyone, however fervent, vote for Brexit so they could nip down to Clarks and get a good deal?

He also tells us that the full benefits of Brexit may take 50 years. I am thinking that the food issue might need sorting before that.

We have six trade deals in the bag including one with the Faroe Islands.

Here is the Wikipedia explanation of Faroese food – some of which we could no doubt import.

Traditional Faroese food is mainly based on meat, seafood and potatoes and uses few fresh vegetables. Mutton of the Faroe sheep is the basis of many meals, and one of the most popular treats is skerpikjøt, well aged, wind-dried mutton, which is quite chewy. The drying shed, known as a hjallur, is a standard feature in many Faroese homes, particularly in the small towns and villages. Other traditional foods are ræst kjøt (semi-dried mutton) and ræstur fiskur, matured fish. Another Faroese specialty is tvøst og spik, made from pilot whale meat and blubber. (A parallel meat/fat dish made with offal is garnatálg.) The tradition of consuming meat and blubber from pilot whales arises from the fact that a single kill can provide many meals. Fresh fish also features strongly in the traditional local diet, as do seabirds, such as Faroese puffins, and their eggs. Dried fish is also commonly eaten.

Now, I am an increasing fan of fewer food airmiles, locally-grown, seasonally-eaten food but I am not at all sure that our farmers can adapt to suddenly growing more cabbages, potatoes, enough wheat for our bread.

And though I know a surprisingly tasty recipe for turnips, I am not sure that will take the place of peppers, camembert, olives, grapes, and though I love Isle of Wight tomatoes, I am not sure there will be enough to go round.

Anyway, that is all not about books or what you find in an Oxfam bookshop so I’ll end with some slivers of delight of stuff that make sorting through a tonne of books on a Bank Holiday, and when you get to the end and stand back, someone else comes in with ten boxes….

Daphne Du Maurier and Brexit

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“Emma, who lives in Cornwall with her retired grandmother, a famous retired actress, wakes one morning to find that the world has apparently gone mad:

No post, no telephone, no radio, a warship in the bay and American soldiers advancing across the field towards the house.

The time is a few years in the future. England has withdrawn from the Common Market and, on the brink of bankruptcy, has decided that salvation lies in a union – political, military and economic – with the United States.

Theoretically, it is to be an equal partnership; but to some people it soon begins to look like a takeover bid.”

This is on the flyleaf of Rule Britannia, written by Daphne Du Maurier in 1972.

I had never seen this book before – but as you, dear reader, know by now, Oxfam is a Pandora’s box of surprises.

(Yesterday the box opened to reveal an inundation of books – just when Duncan, an Oxfam stalwart if ever there was one, and I thought we had the shop all sorted out – and they were mostly recycling-sack fillers.)

Back to Daphne.  As a (deflated) Bremainer, I am sure that we are living in the phoney war period and the real fall out will come over months and then years.

Yesterday, I was culling the Old and Interesting shelves and although we give them a longer chance than say, gardening, there comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and they have to go.

I picked up a book on the history of the Liberal Party in its early days and was about to throw it onto the reject pile, when I thought again – for the very pragmatic reason that I didn’t have enough alternatives to fill up the shelf.

Now, that book has been there for months but blow me down as they say, half an hour after I had moved it from one shelf to the one lower down, a woman bought it.

I asked her if she was a political historian and she said no but her daughter had done a masters in international politics and was now working in London.

Then she reduced her voice to a whisper and said, ‘ She was so angry about the Brexit vote that she joined the Liberal Party. She would have joined Labour but there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment.’

(Whilst social and mainstream media is full of stories about vile threats and angry denunciations of Remainers and Brexiteers alike, in Petersfield it seems, we reduce our voices to a whisper when talking politics.)

And that young , likely-to-be-on-the-receiving-end-of-the-bad-news-about-Brexit  womanis right, there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment and not likely to be one, or for that matter much in the way of a vigorous opposition party, for the foreseeable future.

So, with Trump dangerously likely to end up in the White House and the fallout of our referendum still to come, I am off to read what Daphne Du Maurier prophesied.