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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Thursday 4 June 2026 at 08:39

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If I stand on these books...

[ 2 minute read ] 

Access Denied....Access Denied.....Declined

Storytellers, or perhaps I mean creative writers, often find it difficult to come up with something new, or do I mean fresh?

I have a stack of books, a tiny library if you will; right from Arts and Crafts and Cooking through to Business Law, passing through, of course, Marketing, Economics and Logisitics (including Systems Theory). I even have a book on the Weather. It should never be difficult to come up with something strange to write about. In any case, people are funnily weird. I need only to open my front door to be amazed.

There is a man who walks his dog in the morning and his wife walks at least twenty feet behind him; never beside him. They never talk or acknowledge each other. I think he must have strayed at some time in the past and she follows him to make sure he stays on the marital path.

There is the family whose children have dirty and old 1990s plastic scooters, you know, those ones that look like they are inflated; and the push-chair buggy is filthy; but the parents insist they have jobs such as lecturer and NHS consultant.

I used to pretend that I sailed (until I did) just to be able to say I do something interesting. One day, I cut my finger quite deeply and needed micro-surgery. The nurse told me she sails as well. She asked me what I sail. Ooops!

There is the man whom everybody thinks is highly knowledgeable, and he is; but he also isn't. He has gaps in his thinking that make me think something went wrong. I think he just stopped learning because he got full.

There is the chap who works in the Co-op who I think might be clever but he says he hides it in case people think he is stupid. He looks over his shoulder when he says this. He thinks people have a gravity that attracts the truth or lies or something.

*

Preparing a post

I don't have much to do today, so I shall spend some time reading the following books to see if I can amalgamate some elements from each:

'Encyclopaedia of Superstitions' by E. & M.A. Radford

'Locke' by Michael Ayers

The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary

'Simply Psychology' by Michael Eysenck

'Atmosphere, Weather & Climate' (4th edition) by Roger G. Barry and Richard Chorley

'Principles of Marketing' by Kotler, Wong, Armstrong & Saunders

and perhaps

'Logistics and Supply Chain Management' by Martin Christopher

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