My earliest memory is books. Libraries. Baby books. Asterix and Obelix comics. A Robin Hood book, gift from a cousin. Best version I have ever read. The library at school. The local library where you could borrow two books for two weeks. Weekly walk to library. Famous Five. Charles Dickens. The lending library I set up from my own personal collection, complete with library cards and book insert with rules and due dates, with my friends borrowing books (and stern fines threatened then forgiven).
I lived in a world of books growing up.
The feel of tissue thin pages of a bible. Gold edged. So thin I wondered how it existed. Tiny words printed. The lovely calligraphy in the Quran. Gold edges. Lovely scent of the pages.
Lovely smells of old books. My grandfather’s old old copy of A Thousand and One Nights. The oldish classics in the library with thick pages. Beautiful illustrations in my extensive Enid Blyton collection. In an age where we had one animated cartoon once a week at 4pm, for twenty minutes (He-Man. Then She-Ra. Spider Woman. Wow.) We rode bikes, climbed trees. Read books. Played outside in the mud. So much fun. Coloring books. Hours of lego. Drawing. Gardening, planting crops to sell to my mother’s kitchen. Playing with kittens. Climbing a tall tree overseeing the entire town, sitting there with a book, swaying in the wind (careful, don’t grab a chameleon disguised as part of a branch).
Joy of books. Lost in another world. Can’t stop reading. All night. Need to know what happened. Following Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple and the Five Foundouters on their adventures. Discovering wildlife with teenagers Hal and Roger exploring wild areas of the world (Willard Price adventures).
Flourishing soul 