One of those odder moments

I was just walking home from town, and I was passed on the pavement (snarl!) by a cyclist - who paused twenty yards ahead of me, unbuckled her helmet, dropped it into a council litter-bin, remounted her cycle and pedalled away. Presumably she feels that if she keeps off the roads her own life will be safe enough, now that she's passed all her risks on to the pedestrians around her - but it was still a weird thing to see.

In which I am stronger than you think

I was in town this morning, shopping for this and that, and being conspicuously undercharged all the way, from the coffee beans to the pancetta. This is good. Then I arrived at the Oxfam bookshop, and discovered why the fates were slipping me these extra pennies. There was a Chalet School book that I don't have in hardback. A reprint, with a very tatty dustcover, but neither of those troubles me. It was eighty quid, though, and that troubles me a great deal.

Nevertheless, you are sitting there thinking that I bought it anyway. Aren't you? He's just finished a book, you're thinking, and he's got all the willpower and resolve of overcooked asparagus when it comes to things he wants...

Well, you're wrong. I left it on the shelf, and I'm not going back for it. It's just too much. I did once spend fifty quid on a Chalet School book, in the same shop yet; but that was the day my dad died, and I didn't much care about the money. And the book was a first edition, and still little more than half the price of this one; and more than all of that, I thought he'd have appreciated the gesture. He was always much amused by the pleasure that I took from these 'dreadful' books (his word), especially as they did act as a link between his childhood and mine: the first of them was published in 1926, when he would have been six, and the last in 1970, when I was eleven.

There's a difference, though, between being amused and taking the piss. I am not going back for that book.