Recycling at Raynes Park

The waiting room at Raynes Park railway station has been quite productive of late, notably of an introduction to the autobiography of Osbert Sitwell. I had been thinking that perhaps it might be a better place to leave some of my books than the Oxfam bin at Kiln Lane, but I found yesterday evening that someone had beaten me to it.

My first find, a Nigel Balchin called 'seen dimly before dawn', a library book which had had the first few pages torn out but which retained the original dust jacket and which was printed at a time when capitalisation of the words making up a title was clearly out of fashion. It only took a few minutes this morning to determine that this was a ladies' book and was so translated to the other side of the bed.

But after that, in new territory, the land of cast-offs of some bookish gent. who either lived near Raynes Park or passed through. A handy little tri-lingual guide to Girona Cathedral. A booklet celebrating the 50th anniversary of the inauguration  of the railway of the Lower Congo, a booklet which comes with two pull out maps and which appears not to fall in with current views on the behaviour of the Belgian colonists of the Congo. (It seems ironic now that Roger Casement should have been documenting this only a few years before others went on to laud the plucky behaviour of our gallant ally in the opening stages of the first world war. I associate to the shockingly good looking young street walkers from the Congo on patrol near the Place de Brouckère last time I was in Brussells). The bulletin of the German Historical Institute of London for November 2010. And last but not least a well illustrated catalogue of the museum of shop signs of Paris (see http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/).

Having extracted these five it seemed a bit greedy to take more, although there were other items of interest, and as it was I felt that I should donate my programme for the 'Crucible' to the pile, perhaps to save some careful commuter the expense of buying his own. Perhaps to prompt some theatrical commuter to go to the show.