pumpkinstrokemarrow

Having done the rock scene, down to town to visit the book scene. Started off with a heavy haul from the Oxfam shop, new Kindle notwithstanding. So I get a fairly new Collins two way French dictionary for £3.99. The lady explained that they got plenty of dictionaries so they were priced to move, so it has now displaced my 35 year old Harrap's Shorter, very much the same sort of thing but with rather tired layout and slightly smaller in size.

Item two, a two volume history of the Anglo-Saxons by Hodgkin. First published in 1935 and this edition in 1952, so probably a good bit older than my Myres (1986-1988) and a bit older than my Stenton (1943-1971). On the other hand, despite being produced at a time when rationing was not long ended, it has a good number of fold out maps in several colours, the sort which you can consult while continuing to read, something which modern books seem to go in for very rarely. Plus plenty of figures and plates. Maps, figures and plates all helpfully listed along with the table of contents. A Thames & Hudson job before its time.

A pleasant read in an easy going style. I learn, for example, that contrary to what I had thought, the British Isles were not covered in forests at the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Far less of them than there were in Germany at about the same time. Also that the biggest single forest was the Weald in Kent and Sussex (from the German wald for wood). And that in both Kent and Sussex there were laws to the effect that if you were a stranger in an area, strayed off the road and failed to announce your presence by blowing on your horn, it was assumed that you were up to no good and could be speared on sight, with no wergeld payable.

Perhaps the quaintest find so far is a map showing the distribution of nigrescence in Britain. Nothing to do with either African Africans or African Americans, rather all to do with the survival of the darker Celts among the lighter Anglo-Saxons. Which according to the map was mainly in the west, although there is an odd clump of dark in north western home counties, the counties, that is, to the immediate north west of London. The distribution was obtained by reading the records of 13,000 deserters from the army and navy. Hodgkin does not trouble with statistical detail but the interested reader may consult the work of J. Beddoe, published in 1885.

The only fly in the ointment being that I paid Oxfam slightly more than I would have had to have paid Abebooks for the same thing.

Carried on down to Hall's, a very traditional sort of second hand bookseller. A grand version of the sort of thing still to be found in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road, complete with outdoor bookshelves for the cheaper offerings and ladders to reach the higher offerings inside. Here I was able to buy a copy of the plays of John M. Synge, this copy being reprinted in the year of my birth, which I thought a good omen. The reason for this rather obscure - for me anyway - purchase was our upcoming visit to the Old Vic to see his 'Playboy of the Western World'. Which on a first reading ought to be good, although there will be scope for turning the thing into slapstick. Let's hope they manage to restrain themselves and retain the native fun of the thing.

Before we go I shall have to find out what a loy is. Here there and everywhere in the play, used for bashing one's father over the head when he comes over a bit strong. My OED can do no better than a sort of Irish spade. But I think I know someone in TB who can do better than that.

Moved onto a closing down carpet shop where we discovered that the pattern of the carpet in our bedroom was Turkmen something. The shop had a carpet with the identical pattern, but slightly smaller, slightly older, rather poorer condition and made in the badlands of Afghanistan rather than in Brussels. It cost about five times what we paid for our version maybe 35 years ago. Perhaps in a few years time I will set sprog 1.1 the task of trawling through the many sites devoted to these carpets to run down what the something was. In the meantime I offer the following from somewhere in ONS: 'the table shows that over the third of a century since 1970, prices overall rose ten times, with food prices rising more slowly, by a little over eight times. This compares with an 18-fold increase in average earnings and a 36-fold increase in house prices. Looking at individual commodities, of those listed, only cod has exceeded the growth in average earnings. At the other end of the scale, the smallest price increases were recorded for tomatoes and onions, each of which rose by less than five times'. Not evidence that we were done when we bought our carpet, probably from Maples when it was still in Tottenham Court Road.

Closed the visit by finding a nut tree carrying filberts, something we do not do in Epsom. A filbert, in my book, being a long rather than round sort of hazel nut, named for St. Philibert (his tomb can be found at Saint-Philibert-de-Grand-Lieu, which survived being ransacked by the Vikings in the 9th century, but I have not yet found out what the chap was made a saint for). Collected a few, just for form.

Back home, the Kindle fights back with several mentions of something called a glckstritter in 'Women in Love'. Being several mentions, one assumes that it is not a misprint. Not in my German dictionary and takes a few minutes to run the thing down in Google (through a big haul of references back to 'Women in Love') and as far as I can make out it means an adventurer, knight errant or freelance (in the medieval sense), despite the literal rendering being luck (glück) knight (ritter). Other spellings might include glückstritter and gluecksritter. Other finds include a computer game and various bloggers with the first of these as names. I think that what I saw on the Kindle is probably a misprint, but one possibly reproduced from whatever text the Gutenberg people scanned in.

One oddity was the presence in the hit lists of a number of sites which appeared to be able to pretend to Google that they contained the search term, but which did not really. No apparent connection. Do such sites contain huge lists of words to confuse the search crawlers? Don't usually do any harm because they come well down long hit lists where they are not visible, rather than well down short hit lists where they are.