AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHH! So many books, so little time! Life would be so much easier if I was completely illiterate! Must.. fight... urge to... buy second-hand.. books... It's no good. Although right now I don't want to read Asimov's "Foundation trilogy", I get the strange feeling that in the distant future I will - and if I don't buy that box set now the timelines of my destiny will become strangely warped somehow. Besides, it looks good on my shelf. K'ching. And... Oh look! They've got "On the Road"! I should have read that by now! K'ching. My neck hurts from tilting it to read all these well presented spines. K'ching. The back cover blurbs are all melting into one huge BLURB in my mind. K'ching.


This has been my life for a couple of years now. I've been going through a slow process of shedding my possessions in that time and I have finally arrived at the things that I have desperately clung on to 'til last - my books. I decided to get rid of them about two weeks ago. I planned to sell them over the internet (y'know...Amazon marketplace, eBay...). This is how I'd dealt with all the other stuff that had defined my life. But the trips to the post office had become epic battles against tedium. I couldn't face another jiffy bag. "RIGHT! That's it. I'm gonna box 'em up and give 'em to Oxfam!"

Then an email arrived from my mate Frotch. Who had no idea of my Michael Landy-ish brainstorm. Seems this email was about some site called ... well, I'm sure you can guess. WOW! Synchronicity time kicked in, in a manner that would have made Carl Jung bab his trolleys. I'd actually had this idea before! I'd asked a friend to post a crappy note I'd made in the front of a book I'd lent him, then leave it on the seat next time he caught his train. Didn't happen. But now this! You can actually find out where it went! As that fella having a go with a massive gun in Robocop says: "I LIKE IT!"