Daddy referred to my mother's reproductive organs as "her little flower"
There are many reasons we like strolling down Bermondsey Street. There's the smell of freshly baked bread from the bakery, the out of place Mexican vision of the Fashion & Textile museum, the local notices, the hellos from the girls at United Nude, the ultra hip women and the blokes who look like Nathan Barley... most of all though we like the free books.
For at least the last 12 months some generous soul, or souls, have been releasing books into the wild - not in a fully fledged BookCrossing manner (no BCID!), but rather in a "I'll stick these books up on the wall and see if anyone wants them" sort of way. And over the year we've managed to expand our reading matter without once catching the secret Santa or finding a single clue within the books themselves.
Perhaps we're just naff detectives, perhaps we're stealing from a nearby bookshop we haven't spotted, perhaps you know where these books come from...
Not that we really care. It's like questioning an act of God - just this morning we set off to Heathrow worried that the remaining pages of the Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee would be exhausted before we'd even got to Green Park when we spotted a yellow beacon sat atop the familiar wall - the book graveyard had coughed up a new corpse: I, Fatty by Jerry Stahl. Without a pause in our stride we picked up the tome like it was the most natural thing in the world and by the time we reached the airport Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle was like an old friend (not that we'd leave him alone with our sister mind you).
Now we're not suggesting that all our readers head for Bermondsey Street tomorrow morning in the hope of picking up the new Paul Auster (this isn't Freecycle) but it would be nice to think that this kind of thing went on in other parts of the city. Does it? Let us know...
