In pursuit of the ephemeral, my eye is increasingly caught by minutiae. Here is a fragment of a green, glass bottle on the pavement.
"What matters is that you sacrifice something you really like - in my case it's chocolates," says Jane, talking about Lent. "Who told you that?" says Peter, who also helps in the bookshop. "Did God tell you?" I am the only other person present. He turns to me and says: "Sorry. I shouldn't say that sort of thing in the shop." "Not at all," I say: "It's the sort of thing that you might expect to hear in a French bookshop". "I'm flattered," he says. But I am only a rare visitor to French bookshops, and I am beginning to wonder if I am right.
Because I am constantly searching the ground for items to photograph, I see things which I would normally miss. Here is a 5p piece. It's too useful for my series on ephemerae, so I pick it up and put it in my pocket.
3 comments:
I like this image, indeed I do Glitter of green glass..
"Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, Goblin......."
Drat, HHB beat me to it with 'Green glass Goblin...'
I'm afraid I don't hang out in many French bookshops either. Our local bar in Moncontour was recently hosting a public showing of a video about Chomsky, though, 'le premier intello de nos temps', according to the board outside.
Mrs BB and I live in a world apart from the chocolaphiles. Me, I can take milk chocolate or leave it though I would much prefer a sausage; as to the dark stuff I leave it. Mrs BB doesn't like any chocolate at all. The serried ranks of chocolaphiles simply cannot believe this and are convinced that her antipathy is the result of not being offered the best chocolate. As a result she is bombarded with expensively wrapped (and priced) packets from Belgium which, like the Queen faced with a display of belly-dancers from Micronesia, she smiles at and puts to one side. I am not in a good position to report French bookshop practices; my preference is always for paperbacks (cheaper, easier to hold up when reading in the bath) and these are available at supermarkets. My impression is that French bookshops are ill-lit; certainly they often have yellowish film attached to the inside of the display windows, probably to hinder the reading of spines inside.
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