On this occasion the stalls had been cunningly arranged to make the grand hall look full, not altogether successfully. Both buyers and sellers were most slightly shabby older men, rather like myself. Both sellers and stock were only slightly posher versions of what you might find at a car boot sale at Hook Road Arena. And there were not nearly enough sellers to make the thing go with a swing, despite some discounting, and one able to hear much moaning in the background from the sellers about the various vagaries of selling books on the internet. Not to mention the odd story from the front line of the chemo. room.
I was most tempted by a facsimile edition of the original manuscript, a mixture of manuscript and typescript, of 1984. A rather grand book in size, production and content but at £34 I thought too much for something to be pulled out to entertain visitors from time to time. I settled for a fiver for a handsomely produced commemoration volume for a watercolourist of the 1920's called Evelyn Cheston. Published by Faber, printed by the Cambridge University Press, text by Mr. Cheston and plates by collotype, which I suppose was the latest thing in picture printing at the time. It would be interesting to see some of the originals to see how they compare, although this might be tricky as most of the works appear to be in private hands, perhaps at the time, those of the artist's widower.
The book came with various bits and bobs, some perhaps from a previous owner and some slipped in during its travels. Two of them - see illustration above - had an Irish flavour. The photograph appears to come from an Irish newspaper, perhaps from the days of the Free State, and to have been carefully mended with sellotape, possibly the real thing rather than some Poundland imitation (see http://www.poundland.co.uk/). It must have been important to someone. While the reverse includes a picture of two very severe looking ladies, both misses, on the occasion of the East of Ireland tennis championships. Sadly, undated.
From Dorking by the back roads to Polesden Lacey where they were having a record breaking day and the place was awash with happy families young and old. We had been warned off the newly reorganised restaurant and BH took a sausage roll from a barbecue grill which had been set up in the stable courtyard. Operated by a pleasant young man who, from the way in which he was cutting open the hand-held long-rolls, looked as if he might have had an accident by the end of the busy day.
Pleasant stroll to the east, along what Google now tells me to have once been the Dorking Road, finding as well as the corpse of the previous post, a fine stand of pine trees of some sort, somewhere near Google Maps reference 51.255074, -0.362081. Strolled back west to inspect the formal and kitchen gardens, on the way coming across a stone carved quotation from page 157 of our very own copy of the Iliad, the one which I may have mentioned before and which contains engaging pencil notations of the St. Trinian's variety.
In the former garden there were some traces of the tulip festival of former years and in the latter a very pretty new-to-us plant called 'Pride of Gibraltar' and also known to Google as cerinthe major atropurpurea, Honeywort, Blue Honeywort, Blue Wax Flower or Blue Shrimp Plant, although the pictures he offers do not do much justice to the plants which we saw. Apparently used cut, inside the house, presumably as a foil to something more flashy.
PS: the feature whereby you can paste a reference into the search box on Google Maps, to be taken to the place in question, is very natty. A nice bit of software engineering.
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