Well, today was our big monthly shopping day, when we spend the generously large pension our bountiful Government showers upon us.
We drove to Dumfries; I headed straight for Waterstones. A few weeks ago, B won some book tokens in a crossword competition; he didn’t want them so I got them. So I was expecting to have the fairly novel experience of going into a bookshop and getting brand new books. I was after two books in particular – Jay Griffiths’ Wild, which a friend keeps recommending to me and which our local library can’t seem to get a copy of; and a CSS handbook, preferably The CSS Hanbook, or anything thorough that at least mentions CSS3.
But I was to be disappointed. The Jay Griffiths book was out of print until May; and the computer books section was absolutely feeble, with CSS only covered in a single general web design book.
A good quarter of that tiny section was devoted to large-format, large print books with titles like “The Internet For Seniors” and “Computing For The Over-50s”. As an over-50s myself (I loathe and despise that horrid imported US term ‘senior’) who has been using computers for nearly two decades and who has built the machine she is writing this on, I get incensed by the attitude that we’re all terrified technophobes who have no idea about computing. “Now, dear, this is called a ‘mouse’ – no, it’s not a real mouse…..” Ugh. Without those “Look, Granny, this what you can do with a computer!” books taking up the already limited shelf space, the shop might have been able to stock some really useful computing books.

Oh well. Then it was off to Morrisons and Lidl. Lidl is a pretty peculiar shop in some ways. Every time I go in, I have this odd feeling that I’ve stepped through a space-vortex portal and landed in Mannaheim or Jarlsberg. It’s a German chain (I think), so it has loads of stuff from Europe and all the labels are in at least six languages, and all of it very cheap. There’s piles of strange-looking tinned and packed foodstuffs that are presumably staple fare in places like Belgium or Denmark. Plus, it sometimes sells very strange general goods that I wouldn’t expect to see in any supermarket. For instance, for about two months last year, it had lots and lots of horse stuff on sale – harness, blankets, tack, riding gear etc; this in a town where the closest the locals get to horses is when they’re shouting at the screens in the bookies. Then they tried selling lots and lots of indoor exercise stuff, to a customer base that thinks that an evening popping open cans of beer constitute adequate exercise.
This month, they’re selling home-security equipment – cameras, alarms, random-light switches and so on. They seem to be getting their customer based sized up at last.

Then it was home, though some appalling weather, to an unlit fire and aching legs….. I had some work to do on the comp, but now I’m wickered…..

Nighty night…..