Hidden Pleasures

Pottering about in town doing the usual Saturday stuff; getting the essentials, dodging mothers wielding buggies like chariots out of Ben Hur and picking up the paper from the newsagent down the road.

So I'm in a charity shop browsing through the second-hand books and casually ask one of the assistants if there's any other charity shops in town that might have a good range of books.
He in fact gives me directions to a second-hand store that I must have gone past umpteen times on my evening jogs around town. Looked scruffy and assuming from the outside, perhaps that's my it hadn't really caught my eye.

Anyway, find said place and end up spending over 3/4 hour in there! Could have easily become a whole afternoon. Fabulous shop. Run by a chain smoking grumpy old bugger straight out of Black Books and what I presumed to be his partner, a dead ringer for Marsha from Spaced - also surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke and hunched on the stairs apparently mesmerised by a sudoku puzzle. He was especially amused when I let slip that I used to work for the enemy (Waterstone's).

Books all over the place. Piles on tables, on the floor, obscuring the till...

"There's the shed out back as well if you want to have a browse out there..."

"Oh?"

Walk out the back alleyway and open to door to said shed. Flick the lights on and illuminate a cavernous room full of even more books; like a cross between The Tardis and one of those big secret warehouses that you used to see in The X-Files.

Actually only came out with one book

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

as I got a sort of book-snowblindness after a while.

Just goes to show what you can find on your doorstep if you open your eyes.