With a little help from my friends…

Today I bought a lot of books in one of the few remaining second-hand book shops where the books are stacked almost to the ceiling, precariously hanging off and over shelves, full of forgotten lore….

It was exactly the same sort of sense of safety I used to get from hanging out in those places as a child… hundreds of thousands of impossible worlds, lives, adventures and tragedies stacked higgledy-piggledy against the fundamentals of physics, ‘Life-Lite’ Literature and motorcycle mechanics.

I stayed there for hours, and then made a deal with the owner so I can go back and clean up his comic collection.

It will give me an enormous sense of well-being, feeding some of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but also attempting to bring order to chaos, and to care for these objects, which are remnants of other people’s dreams or quest for knowledge.

Books are the shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave…