Island

I volunteer for the Buckinghamshire Home Library Service, visiting two older women who are unable to get to their local library and taking them a choice of books and recordings to select from. They've each filled out a form indicating their tastes in literature. One of them, whilst always glad to see me each month, is never very forthcoming with feedback on the books she has had from me. Ordinarily these are very much in the Catherine Cookson/Maeve Binchy line - 'family sagas', sometimes contemporary, sometimes historical.

This month I decided to try and widen the scope, so I took out Selina Scott's A Long Walk In The High Hills, her account of time spent renovating a house in the Tramuntana hills of Mallorca.

Having left this with her, I went on to visit my other customer, who returned a number of books she had finished with. Whilst waiting at the library to hand these back in, I idly flicked through the pages of one of them, where I found this bookmark, left there by a previous borrower:

and here is the reverse:

The following day I took part in the Ride & Stride event, raising money for the Buckinghamshire Historic Churches Trust and my local parish church, St Lawrence, West Wycombe. This year I was joined by my father-in-law. On his bike, I noticed he was carrying two water bottles. One of these, well used and slightly battered, bore the name of a place he'd visited in Mallorca.
I rather wish I'd taken a photograph.