Sunday, February 1/2009

Sunday afternoon walk. Stop at the crowded second hand shop to find some reading material. There are plenty of books but they're hard to access, piled two layers deep and hard to see in the dark shop. I move whole stacks at a time to peer behind at other stacks, carefully replacing not only books but ornaments and kitsch piled on top whenever a book sticks out far enough to make this possible. A clothes hanger with 3 colourful neckties dangles in front of one shelf. For the bottom shelf I sit on the floor and inspect one handful at a time. There is an amazing variety from Barry Goldwater to play scripts to manuals on breastfeeding. In the end I emerge with four read aloud candidates - Pride and Prejudice (which neither of us has read recently), Dickens' Hard Times, John Mortimer's Titmuss Regained and Edith Sitwell's The Queens and the Hive, history of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. I bargain a little to get them for three euro instead of four, and would have bargained harder had I noticed how ruthlessly annotated the Austen and Dickens are, scarcely a page of either untouched by childishly handwritten explanations and lipstck coloured highlighting - a far more thorough job than most undertaken by my own former students. No petering out here after the opening chapters. As they are Penguin editions, I have not even checked inside until after paying my money.

A walk along the waterfront and we sit on a bench watching the endless Sunday parade of walkers, local and tourist. Sundays are always semi-carnival mode along here. Family groups, tourist couples, foreign workers and stalls with ice cream and helium filled animal shaped balloons. From the other side of the street we can smell the sugar of the candy floss. Sunny and warm and the scent of flower beds under the palm trees. Hotels and cafes on one side of the road and lttle stalls along the beach on the other. Benches on both sides for people watching. And the one way street a constant stream of traffic crawling past, much of it people out to see and be seen. The same cars circle by several times.

The tv schedule promises the film Keeping Mum with Rowan Atkinson in the evening, but for the second time in a month it doesn't appear, a not unusual occurrence in Cyprus. In this case it's replaced with Zorro - fifty some years after the time when J and I would have considered the sword play a great treat.