I popped into the bank a little while ago. I seldom need to go in, as I can do most of what I need on the internet or at the hole in the wall, but we had recently moved from Scotland to Wales, and I had a mittfull of Scottish bank notes which are not widely embraced as currency south of the border (even though they’re still pounds sterling. Even at the food shops in King’s Cross Station, where the Edinburgh train tends to arrive. Don’t get me started.)
Anyway, I was at the bank, as I said, and they had a table out with some used books for sale, raising money for some charity or another. Cancer, I think. Most of the books on the table looked pretty carcinogenic, if you ask me, but that’s often the way of these things. The dregs and the disposable circulate, whilst the books that are actually worth reading tend to stay on our shelves. Funny that.
But I looked at the table anyway, and on it was Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist. I know a lot of people get pretty jazzed about his stuff, and his books and his thoughts were present with many of our fellow peregrinos on the camino, which we walked ten years ago on the button. I was not tempted, nor did I put much faith in Shirley MacLaine’s also-influential account. She got a lot of people scared about dogs – people practicing their faux-fencing skills with those wonderful Nordic poles in case they had to defend themselves on the journey. (We did meet a dog – a yappy thing with a blue ribbon around its neck. I wanted to take a picture for Shirley’s sake.) Continue reading
