What to do when the Library is closed.
(and the Orienteering is cancelled).
Ilze’s long career in the printing industry and my lifelong aversion to discarding “old friends”, has left us with a house full of books. We have a total area of Ikeas Billy Bookcases (the assembling of which is soon to become an Olympic sport) reaching 17.26 square metres with a lineal shelf distance extending to 47.60metres.
They range in age from a copy of “The Fpectator,” publifhed in 1733 to “the Handmade Loaf” by Dan Lepard that Ilze order on line yesterday.

They vary in size from Cayley’s What bird is that, weighing in at 3.85kgs to a Lilliput Libraries French Dictionary at 11 gms.

I have decided to start on the top shelf in my office, south wall, east end, and there I find a copy of Love in the time of Cholera by Marquez. Well perhaps not that one then and next to it The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. (No pedant should be without one).
Over the years I have bookmarked a number of my favorite authors from the classic Roman period and among them are these pertinent remarks echoing down over two millennia.

Firstly, from cOvid19 on Orienteering and the virus.
“Medio tutissimus ibis.” A middle course is the safest to take.
“Video meliora, proboque: detorora sequor.” I see the better way and approve it; I then follow the worst.
“Procul hinc, procul este severae!” Far hence, keep far from me, you grim woman.

Then this gem from VIRusGIL
“Forsan et haec olim, meminisse iuvabit.” Maybe one day we shall be glad to remember even these things.

From JUVENAL,
“Cantabit vacuus coram, latrone viator.” Travel light and you can sing in the robbers face”

On a more somber note, these, from VOLTAIRE on War.
“God is on the side, not of the heavy battalions but of the best shots”
“We owe respect to the Living; to the dead we owe only the truth”

Finally, from PETE, with apologies to Keats, “take care in theses aching times, these moments big as years and hope again to meet under the same bright patient stars.”
I am off to the garage to build more toilet paper holders and hope that the Severae will do cheese toasties for lunch.