The good old days?

Not a brilliant start to the day today as I was still awake with my head buzzing like a trapped fly at 3.30 this mornng. It's full moon tomorrow - I blame the tug on my watery soul.

I read ruefully that in 1935 there were two bookshops in Forres High Street. One was also a chemist shop; strange combination of goods, but it must have worked. Rather like an early branch of Boots. Come to think of it Boots the Chemist did publish books .... anyway, this was the shop that sold 'quality fiction.' Those who wanted 'light fiction' went to Kathy Munro's in Tolbooth Street who soon had to extend her premises.

An author popular in those days was Annie S.Swan who wrote as she breathed in an early romantic aga-saga genre which would certainly have suited the local female readership, especially as most of the stories were set in Scottish towns and villages. When she was twenty six she was earning enough from her writing to enable her husband to go to medical school. Amazing. Kathy stocked Annie's novels and also sold Westerns and thrillers.

The more discerning reader would have joined an early version of the Book Club, paying 1 shilling a month which was spent on the latest books to be published. When a copy arrived it would have the names of the club members written on one of its blank endpapers and be circulated to each in turn, the last reader keeping the book. Robert Graves 'Goodbye to All That' was publishd about this time; Seigfried Sassoon's 'Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man' and Remarques's 'All Quiet on the Western Front.'

I'm not sure when the library arrived here but that must have changed things and perhaps the comradeship involved in sharing a chosen book was lost. The moral of that story is - all advance involves some loss?

I've just done really badly ('not too bad' was the comment I earned) in an on-line 'intelligence test of the tricksy variety. 'Would the law in Scotland allow a man to marry his widow's sister?' 'How many animals of each sex did Moses take on board the ark?' I got both those wrong. Oh dear. Very demoralising. I think I shall go back to bed for the rest of the day.