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Thursday 17th 41F, overcast with rain by 9am. No walk today.
We waited 13 days for a vital food parcel to arrive from the UK. Four whole days and a weekend for customs clearance. Then we didn't hear the postman knock! So I drove around the lanes looking for his van for half an hour. Luckily he was delivering in a local village as I passed through on the way back home. What a relief!!
It promised to stop raining after 2pm so I went for my walk. Only to be drizzled on.
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Wednesday 16th 25-41F, misty and cloudy. A hard white frost. I was up at 4.15 today. 🙄
I have been researching how to rid myself of my 8 square meters of non-fiction books currently residing on six different bookshelves. The Danish Library only accepts donated books in Danish. The sheer weight and volume [?] means posting them anywhere is impossibly uneconomical. We don't have anywhere to hold an informal book sale. Besides, it would take decades to dispose of only a few. Even at pocket money prices. Local charity shops couldn't cope with so many books. Particularly non-fiction "technical" books in English. It would be nice to donate them to an international charity to spread the knowledge they contain.
I have now contacted the antiquarian bookshop in Copenhagen for advice. They have a national network for finding book requests. Failing that, it will be a huge bonfire in the garden. Or multiple, exhausting trips to the recycling yard to fill the waste paper container! What an awful waste! Literally and in every sense of the term!
Another trailer full of junk from the shed has been delivered and duly sorted into the appropriate, recycling containers. I've lost count of the trips I have made so far.
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We have been waiting for 12 days for a simple food parcel ordered from England. It spent two days and a weekend in UK customs. Then another two days in Danish customs. The vendor promised a 2-3 day service for our £23 in postage.
Brexit is working? For whom? The UK banks cast off all their ex-pat customers. After over half a century as a customer in my case. No doubt they pocketed a nice big fat bonus for every loyal customer they dumped to save on Brexit paperwork. Having our bank balance sent from abroad, to clear the UK account, automatically triggered warnings of money laundering. The banks and tax authorities in Denmark sat up and took notice.
How much did the Pro-Brexit "TV slebs" and politicooze make from the Brexit divorce from reality? A corrupt farce by a whole bunch of crooks! But, thank God, The drunken Commons Clown got clowns crowns back on his beer glasses. Loser buys the round!
Partying, while the real owner of the crown[s] sat alone in the cathedral at her husband's state funeral. Though even that image was probably playing to the crowd. Overemphasising her isolation. As the Gravely Blighted, Royal Tourist Show crumbles to dust around her designer jodhpurs.
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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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