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Tuesday 15th 39-43F, thick mist. Up at 5am. A tour out on the spray tracks to get some exercise away from the traffic. The roads were plastered in thick mud from the spraying tractors.
I just spent an hour adding more to yesterday's post on junk and recycling. There is plenty more to say and nobody reads my blogs anyway. So I shall indulge myself, as usual.
What do you do with old books? Like half a dozen book cases full of old books? Non-fiction books mostly written in English. A few in Danish. Countless old text books or guides to doing practical stuff. Engineering, cycling, clocks, astronomy, photography etc.etc.. Any of the myriad interests [usually obsessions] I had over the long decades.
Each and every one of these tomes was selected and paid for in a secondhand bookshop, somewhere. Truthfully, I haven't looked at any of them in [say] ten years. Probably 20-35 years in most cases. I stopped reading from paper when my days were filled with staring at a small TV at arm's length instead. By which I mean a series of computer monitors of ever increasing size. Presently paused at 28" but not likely to increase much beyond that. Books have small print and you can't scroll or make the text larger with failing eyesight.
There are no 1st edition classics hidden away. Nothing to whet the appetite of a collector. Except for the clock books. They are always in demand. How to place them elsewhere to my own economic advantage? Have you seen the price of international postage by weight?
So, all in all, my entire book "collection" is [probably] at least half a ton [by weight] of landfill. Or, more likely, cheap fuel to be burnt in a huge [district heating] incinerator to keep people warm in winter. Or to make electricity instead of using Polish or Russian, brown coal.
A quick eyeballing of all the visible shelving suggests I have eight [8] square meters of books! You could start your own, very strange, non-fiction, secondhand bookshop with my "assortment" of books alone. Try that in a country where Danish is the expected language! Bring your own skip if you will just take them away! Pity about the poor local access and lack of parking for rubbish skip "drop and run" lorries.
The logistical problems of moving so many books mounts up exponentially. Imagine if they had a specialist book container at the recycling yard. [When it is open.] How many car trailer trips without overloading? Ouch! Imagine finding someone interested in my whole collection. [Extremely unlikely!] How would they take them away from my rural hovel? We may well be looking into the maw of a hired skip! What a colossal waste! Of material, knowledge and valuable, remaining time.
Paused for breakfast. Only to discover I had only half of my usual bowl full of organic, porridge oats. Though I had just enough organic, low fat milk, to wet a month of breakfasts. I'm definitely losing it on the shopping front. And most other fronts if truth be known.
I fried myself five fish fingers [in factory applied] breadcrumbs last night. It made a change from whole grain, bread rolls. Though I added a buttered [wholegrain] roll. Just to be on the safe side. I need all the energy I can get at the moment!
The supermarkets have discontinued yet another bread roll. Our entire time here [25 years and counting] seems to have been dodging such hurdles. Loaf after favoured loaf has vanished into oblivion. Bread rolls seem to come and go with the weather. There are only two commercial, mass production, bakers in Denmark. We still give daily thanks that we don't have to see Hovis on the shelves.
It became sunny in the afternoon.
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