Off in a different direction to a different library than my usual ones, for a book I particularly want.
I’ve just finished reading ‘May we be forgiven’ by American novelist A.M. Homes. After an uncertain start where I mainly stuck with the book on the advice of Jeanette Winterson who’d said:
“This is the great American novel for our time”
I then got completely involved in the story and am subsequently looking in the back of this novel for what else she’s written. That’s where I find out about ‘The Mistress’s Daughter’.
“On the day that she was born in 1961, A.M. Homes was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two-year-old woman and an older, married man. Thirty-one years later, out of the blue, they tracked her down. ‘The Mistress’s Daughter’ is a riveting account of what happened next.”
Yes, this one’s not a novel, it’s a memoir. I check in the catalogue of Liverpool City Libraries and find I can pick up a copy of the book in three libraries.
So, knowing not only that it’s available, but also what shelf it’s on I set off. Basking in the glory of living in a country with such a magnificent public libraries system.
Wondering if they ever did find anyone to play their historic church organ for them.
There was no famine. Only the potato crop failed. All the other food was stolen and eaten by the English and their agents.
Whatever, deeply distressing to see a security gate like that on a school.
Looks like we’re inside a Private Finance Initiative here.
Notice its opening times. No evenings or Saturdays. The results of the politics of ‘austerity’ – and things could be about to get a lot worse.
Anyway, let’s have a look round.
And the book I’m looking for is precisely where the catalogue had told me it would be.
And decide on the hard-back because it’s got photographs in it. Good to have had a choice though.
I look around the shops at the Fiveways.
It’s baked, obviously, at their bakery down in the Baltic Triangle. But for the last few months they’ve been open here from 3:00 ’til 6:00 Tuesday to Friday. So this is where I always buy our bread now.
Back home then, fulfilled, with books and bread from around the neighbourhood.
A fine walk, Ronnie, with I fine purpose: a good book and a great loaf. I now frequent the Baltic Bakehouse down in the Baltic quarter (funny how cities end up these days with considerably more than four quarters!). Like you, I believe that this is the best bread you could eat. It tastes fresh for several days, and then produces the best toast! Their pastries are heavenly, too (custard tarts whose taste and texture sends me right back to childhood, and almond croissants to die for). I have to restrain myself, though – at their prices I’d soon be seriously out of pocket!
Quality that lasts is good value. And no, no one’s paying either of us to say this!
I enjoyed the walk very much….but am saddened that the libraries are not open in the evenings or on Saturdays….the very times that people are free to go there.
Yes Helen. Don’t know to what extent the hours here are being governed by who else is in the building? Public service, to be truly public needs to leave the 9 to 5 behind it.
Books and bread – the staples of life!
Exactly.
Nice to see a photograph of my former bedroom! (The photo with the Brian Epstein caption: top left of picture – the room in which I slept from 1962 to 1982 – aged 4 to 24). Fascinating read and walk- as are all your blogs. I do much the same myself on a daily basis – the walks that is and the photos but not the writing bit. Now live in Aigburth and spend many a happy hour exploring the hidden treasures of South Liverpool. Thrilled that Calderstones Park was saved; dismayed at any development whatsoever that so much as uproots a single shrub…
Anyway, keep up the good work.