Books, books, glorious books!

We are a one-car family, and every day Ben sails off Newcastlewards in our rather muddy Skoda Fabia whilst Joshy and I stay at home in Durham. There is a bus-stop almost directly outside our house which means we can go into Durham if we want to, but most days we are quite happy to stay at home, as our small village has everything we need: nice places to walk, a doctor's surgery, a Co-Op, and - luxury of luxuries - a library! It takes approximately thirty seconds to get there on foot, and we popped in today to return my old books and borrow new ones.

It's not a huge library by any means, but it will keep me in good supply of books for a long time to come. When we moved here, I realised that we had more books than shelf space and that unless I was prepared to get rid of any of them (which was never going to happen, frankly), we were going to have to either buy more shelves or make more regular use of the library. So off I went to acquire myself a library card (in a pleasing shade of mauve) and a steady influx of new titles. Today, I emerged with three books: The Victorians, an Alan Titchmarsh novel (he doesn't just garden and present his own chat show, it seems!) and Under the Paw, a book to which I suspect we will relate a great deal. Despite having no excuse whatsoever for incurring fines, given how close we live to the library, I was obliged to hand over £1.20 today and am now off to read an online article which I hope will tell me how my money will be used. I hope it's spent on buying more library books...