Medium Delirium

At Pilates last week, I found myself in a cosy little class of just three students. The other two were a middle aged couple, clearly regulars from the way they chatted breezily with the instructor. They didn’t look particularly fit but turned out to be surprisingly strong, managing with ease some exercises that had me shaking like a mound of jelly. Before class began, the husband was putting his things away in the cubby hole and I was standing beside him trying to get my watch off (a fiddly butterfly clip). Sitting on the reformer machine, the wife looked up at the husband and said ‘Wow! I just noticed your socks match your outfit today.” I glanced over at him; he had on a grey dry fit shirt and black shorts. Panning downwards, he’d chosen socks with a pattern of garishly bright circles of primary colours. I have no idea what the wife was talking about. The instructor also looked confusedly at his outfit, then gracefully meandered away onto a new topic.

Ever since reading Shaun Bythell’s excellent Diary of. a Bookseller, I’ve made it a point to try to support local independent bookshops by either buying the books they have, or engaging in what must be the moribund practice of ordering in through them, which I had no idea was possible until I read DOAB. On the hunt for two titles, I wrote to my favourite local bookstore requesting an order, which they noted and put in for me. That was in January of this year. Having never heard back from them since, I took the opportunity when I was in the area to pop in and ask after them. When I explained the situation it seemed to bewilder the young girl at the desk, who hurriedly keyed my details into the shop’s computer. After some investigation she apologetically relayed that, hard as it was to believe, the order was still on its way. She explained that sometimes with standalone requests the supplier could take months to fulfil the order. Since there was zero urgency I assured her it was fine, and they could let me know when (and if) it ever showed up. I find it so charmingly archaic, in an era where almost anything can be ordered online one day and delivered the next, that one could be expected to wait months for a book, or really, for anything at all. It’s hard to say this without sounding sarcastic, but truly, I adore the slowness of it. Of course, I have the privilege of finding this inefficiency endearing rather than annoying, and I’m sure I would feel very differently if instead of books I was waiting on, let’s say, a new set of retainers for my teeth.

Goodnight! Will try to make more of these little sketches of my humdrum little life more often. Really need to write more to justify the WordPress fees.