The Tale Of The Black Rat.

I got up at 8.00 this morning and my little feathered chum with the red jacket was waiting at the back door. I threw a handful of suet pellets out to him and he was soon joined by the blackbird, some scruffy sparrows and the big fat wood pigeon. It had been raining overnight and the sky was dark and overcast but a good soaking has made my tiny garden look quite lush. We should be grateful to live in such a green and pleasant land but a few degrees warmer wouldn’t go amiss. I won’t be going far today so it is a good chance to catch up with my blog page. So, what have I been doing for the past few days? I have stayed in quite a lot. I just finished reading another book by Kazuo Ishiguro called When We Were Orphans. I saw it in a charity shop for £2.00, quite a nice hardback copy. I enjoyed it and when I read about it later on Wikipedia it said that it is regarded as the weakest of his novels. That surprised me because I thought it was almost as good as Remains Of The Day, although there were a couple of things in the story which remained unexplained. Possibly he might have been intending to write a sequel, but I don’t know about that.

I did venture out on Sunday when I went over to Bradford On Avon. There was a reggae band on in the Three Horseshoes pub. The place was jumping, and I met lots of family and friends. It was good fun. I’m glad I left when I did though because I was drinking this cider called Black Rat. I had four pints which was more than enough. I caught the train back to Westbury and went in my local pub and had two more pints of cider. As you can imagine I felt quite rough on Monday and stayed in all day recovering.

I sold a couple of books over the weekend. One was called Stones In The Park which was all about the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park in 1969. Somebody in Italy bought that and a lady in Germany bought an autobiography of Joan Baez. I posted them yesterday morning and went over to Warminster. I found three nice signed books in the Dorothy House charity shop. Firstly, a signed autobiography by Roger Moore called My Word Is My Bond.

I should get quite a few quid for that, I hope. Secondly, a signed book by Neil Gaiman called Norse Mythology. I had heard of this writer, but I didn’t know anything about him, so I looked on Wikipedia and found that he is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. Looking on eBay I found that signed copies of his books are very sought after indeed. The third book I found was called The Death Of Dylan Thomas which is the one that I would actually read myself.

After that I met my friend S in Wetherspoon’s and we shared a bottle of wine and had a nice chat for an hour or so and that was the end of that. Tomorrow, if it’s not raining, I might go for a long walk because Glastonbury is only a few weeks away and I need to get fit for it.