Now at work, rest and play

Golly gosh, I'd forgotten just how time-consuming a full working week can be!  Still, here we are again, what?  The first week of a new job is under my belt and now I've got some time to sit down and write a few lines of this and that - all that has been leading up to this week just gone.

The week previous - that is, two weeks ago now - I spent some time nosing around my local branches of Debenhams, Marks & Spencer and BHS hoping to score some bargain items for m'wardrobe in the summer sales.  I was not disappointed, either, as Debenhams' sale was in full swing (they don't seem to call it the Blue Cross Sale any more, unless they're saving that for Christmas/January?) and I picked up two smashing pairs of cotton trousers that will go well with the majority of my jackets for a casual summer look.  Most importantly, Debenhams' men's trousers go up to a 34" inside leg - perfect for the long of limb such as myself!

Maine New England Navy twill chinos, £12 from £20 at Debenhams
(**sold out**)

The navy blue is a nice, muted colour - giving off an almost workmanlike vibe - but the terracotta twill is my absolute favourite, adding a welcome and different dash of colour to my outfits.

Maine New England Terracotta twill chinos, £10 from £20 at
Debenhams

Marks and BHS had less on offer (and M&S wonders why its year-on-year clothing sales keep taking a battering - definitely a "could do better" on the men's clothing selection, at least) but I was still able to score this beautiful "Autograph" knitted silk tie for a frankly unbelievable £4 (it was actually still marked up at £7.50 on the ticket - I do like pleasant surprises!).

It actually goes quite well with the terracotta trews, don't you think?  It's wonderful to the touch, of course, and knots well too - something that's not always a given with knitted ties, I've found.

Saturday last found me in Rayleigh for the town's first ever Antique & Vintage Street Market, run by the same people who put on the local Runnymede Vintage, Antique and Retro Fairs that I have been to many times in the past and enjoyed, as has been mentioned on this very blog.  Alas I can't see this street market becoming a regular one as it was really very poorly done with barely half a dozen stalls in the high street (which had not been closed as I was expecting), largely selling stuff that would have better been described as bric-a-brac.  There were supposedly more stalls around the corner outside the local auction house (Stacey's, occasional star of Antiques Road Trip and Bargain Hunt) but we - mother, sister and I - we so disappointed we didn't bother with that but instead hit the charity shops.  There I was able to pick up a nice T.M. Lewin shirt for £3.50 and an interesting CD for £1.

Twenty-four songs from The Radio Rhythm Club, a name I'd never come across before but actually that of a B.B.C. programme broadcast during the Second World War.  The Radio Rhythm Sextet was led by a young Welsh clarinetist called Harry Parry(!) who greatly admired American bandleader Benny Goodman, to the point where he emulated him with his own group of top British instrumentalists of the time.  Sadly Harry Parry died in 1956 at the age of 44; The Radio Rhythm Club and Sextet seem to have been lost to the mists of time, since I can't seem to find out much about them.  The Benny Goodman influence is obvious (but just with a soupçon of British smoothness) and it maybe this overt similarity, plus changing musical tastes after the war, that ensured The Radio Rhythm's obscurity.

Still, after all that, I'm glad I bought the CD as it certainly does bubble along.  I do like the Benny Goodman sound anyway and was only recently thinking about finding some more 1940s music, so this ticks the boxes.  Have a Boogi to this:

What else has happened?  Oh yes, I marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War on the 4th August with a single candle and the "lights out" motif, as did most of the country I think.  The B.B.C.'s coverage was rather good, I thought - slightly reserved rather than overdone and all the better for it.

This was the same candle that I burned (we were all given one) at my granddad's
funeral back in 1997. 
I'd never lit it since but it somehow seemed right to use it on the anniversary of WW1

Well, that's all for now, I think.  There's going to be a bit of disorder around here for a little while longer as I continue to settle back into a 5-day working week and get comfortable in the new job but as long as I can post at least once every weekend I'll be happy - and hopefully you, my readers, will be too!  I've already got posts planned featuring the two surviving Lancaster bombers flying together for the first time in 50 years, plus a 61-year-old woman driving a 110-year-old car across Australia!  In the meantime I do still enjoy reading your blogs when I get the chance - usually now a special treat after work! - and I hope you'll continue to stick with mine during this transition.

The Dandy Libraryman

I've been out and about all over the place today, back and forth, hither and yon on various un-vintage errands, but this afternoon I stopped off at my local library to pick up a book I had reserved.

This was the biography of 1930s racing driver and land speed record holder Sir Malcolm Campbell (left), Malcolm Campbell: The Man as I Knew Him, which was written by his widow Lady Dorothy Campbell shortly after he died.  It looks to be a fascinating read and if it is anything like the autobiography of his contemporary racing colleague Sir Henry 'Tim' Birkin, of which I own a 1935 copy, I'm sure it will be.

While I was there I of course browsed the sale shelves but there seemed to be nothing particularly interesting and I was about to turn to go when I saw, in the corner of the bottom shelf surrounded by audiobooks and large hardback novels, a book entitled Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy.  It looked like the fiction books either side of it but closer inspection revealed it to be a biography of the great man by actor/writer Ian Kelly who played the starring role on stage and in the 2006 B.B.C. adaptation Beau Brummell: This Charming Man, which I'm sorry to say I never saw - so that's something to seek out, once I've read the book!.  It might take me a while though as it's a 500-page life-to-death analysis of the man and the period (which is a little outside my sphere of interest really, but for The Ultimate Dandy I'll make an exception!), but I'm looking forward to it and at the moment I've certainly got the time!

source

This hefty, almost as-new tome, which was only published in 2005 and would have set you back £20 in a bookshop, was mine for the princely sum of 25p.  Twenty-five pence!  (In fact it should have been 50p, but the librarian made the same mistake as I initially did and thought it was fiction, and I didn't like to correct her!).  BARGAIN!!

This brings me to the real point of my post - here is a book barely 6 years old, which cost a not inconsiderable sum and it ends up in the sale section for next to nothing in next to no time.  What's more, the Campbell biography had to come from one of the main county library's "stack" (library-speak for the storage room, I think).  I've borrowed a couple of books from the same source over the last few years (another being the autobiography of eccentric British Army officer Lt. Col. A.D. Wintle, which only I seem to withdraw these days!) and it always saddens me that such fascinating books rarely see the light of day or are sold off by the library so quickly (although for 25p from £20 I suppose I shouldn't complain about the latter!) without being fully appreciated by the reading public.  Of course I imagine its all a matter of taste and interest (not to mention demographics - books about 18th Century dandies and 1930s racing drivers/army officers probably aren't in much demand in my part of deepest darkest Essex!) as well as the changing (and not always for the better) role of the public library, but it still seems a shame to see what people are missing out on.  When I look at the withdrawal history of the Campbell book, for example, I see that since 1961 it has been borrowed roughly once every 10 years!  I wonder what kind of people took the book home with them, what their interest was and what they took from it.  Ah well, I suppose that as long as these books are in stack I'll know where to find them, and at least I appreciate them.  Plus it frees up my bookshelf for more cut-price books!

New Year tomes

Well I hope everyone had a fantastic New Year's, whatever you got up to. Myself, I watched 2011 come in on the TV, wondering whether I was alone in thinking that the annual fireworks display in front of the London Eye has gone from impressive to overwhelming - there are only so many times the screen can go bright white before you start thinking "all right, that's enough now". After 10 minutes and no sign of it letting up I switched off, sang along to the version of Auld Lang Syne on my iPod then listened to Tommy Kinsman & His Orchestra playing the Gay Gordons (it was a decades-old tradition in our family to dance to it on New Year's Eve - somehow I've wound up with the record but not enough room and no-one to dance with!).



Since money is tight at the moment I've generally eschewed the sales - only popping out on Thursday to take advantage of them in the purchase of a new electric razor to replace my old one that just happened to pack up on Christmas Eve. I also bought two pairs of Oxford shoes - one brown pair and one black - in the Clarks sale, only to find on getting them home that my blasted feet had hoodwinked me. I can take any size between a 9 and a 10 (my shoes consist of one pair of 9s, one 9½ and one 10!) depending on the style of the shoe. I'd picked up Nines because that's what I was wearing at the time and I thought they were the same but when I arrived home and compared them they were actually identical in style to my Tens and consequently just a smidgen too tight (although they felt OK in the shop - proof that trying shoes on one at a time in a retail environment is not conducive to good decision-making!). So there you have it ladies - we chaps have trouble with our shoes sometimes too!

I took them back the next day and ended up getting a refund as they'd sold out of 10s (blast it), so to quell my disappointment I gave into temptation and went into my local branch of The Works bookshop. In the past I've snapped up some real bargains in there and although I didn't need (or have the space for!) any more books I didn't think it would hurt to have a look. I ended up coming out £10 lighter and 6 books heavier! They were doing 3 for £5 on end-of-stock fiction paperbacks and, as always seems to be the way, I found five that appealed to me. Eventually I found a sixth to make up the offer, and here they are:

For some reason despite being a fan of period crime fiction I've always seemed to restrict myself to Agatha Christie's Poirot series, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books and collections of lurid American pulp fiction from the '20s and '30s, but to my shame I have never read any of Dorothy L. Sayers' wonderful Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (I have seen a few episodes of both the brilliant 1970s series, starring the late Ian Carmichael, and the later '80s adaptation with Edward Petherbridge. I must try and watch some more, preferably the ones with Carmichael). I can put that to rights now as there were copies of two stories - Clouds Of Witness and Whose Body?

Georgette Heyer is another contemporary of Christie and Sayers who I have just recently come across - I picked up a copy of one of her crime novels, Why Shoot a Butler?, in a charity shop a few months ago. It's been a very atmospheric story with a great period feel, so I expect more of the same from Footsteps in the Dark.

It was then that I caught sight of two more books, which I'd never heard of before but which looked intriguing. They're part of The Daisy Dalrymple Series of mysteries by the modern author Carola Dunn and feature the characters of 1920s writer Daisy Dalrymple and her fiance police inspector Alec Fletcher. From what little I've seen, they would appear to be rather in the Tommy & Tuppence mold, I think. Despite being by a current author the books are written in a jolly Twenties style, with lots of period charm, settings, the use of 1920s slang etc. I was strangely both attracted and put off by the covers; a nagging doubt assailed me that - female author, female lead character, Twenties-style artwork on the cover but perhaps slightly feminine - I began to wonder if this was period "chick-lit". I needn't have worried though; the blurb on the back reassured me and it passed my interesting read test - if the first paragraph/page grabs me and makes me want to keep on reading, it's usually a winner.

Now casting about for a sixth book I came across another series - the Jim Stringer - Steam Detective set of six stories. With things starting to spiral out of control and 3 for £5 already now 6 for £10 and threatening to become 9 for £15 or worse I weighed up which of the series sounded the best and settled on The Lost Luggage Porter. Set in 1906, railway detective Jim Stringer investigates two murders on a York-bound train.

So another pile of books is added to my collection and jolly good they sound too. Considering their cover values combined came to over £45 I think a tenner turned out to be an absolute bargain! It'll be a treat to read some new authors for a change; my reading list has been far too narrow of late. Now it's just a matter of finding some space in the bookcase...