There’s a trolley for that!
It’s over three years now since we moved into the bigger shop – with plenty of room, the space we enjoy is not only beautiful as a place for customers to visit and browse, but as a place of work there are parts of the building which have become a proper ‘Book Packing Factory’ – there’s a system and a process through which all the orders flow, and again what’s important is the space. When you don’t have space, you crave it, when you do have it, you tend to take it for granted. With all this space comes the need to move things around, and for that, you need a good trolley – in fact, we love them so much I hadn’t realised we’ve now accumulated a fleet of sixteen trolleys – trolleys for incoming books, postal trolleys for outgoing parcels, trolleys for packing materials, a pallet truck for unloading lorries – we’ve even got an extension to the snooker table packing bench that has wheels, so we’ll count that as a trolley too! Those little humble wheels, invented over 6,000 years ago, are just like the space we have, easily taken for granted, but quite brilliant in their simplicity and essential contribution to the running of a bookshop.
What’s on the trolley this week at Coles? – this is a week of the storytellers, novels from Anthony Horowitz, Celia Imrie and Miles Jupp lead the charge of the bestsellers, Peter V. Brett’s work is always other-worldly; the thrills are from Holly Watt and Mary Paulson-Ellis; lives repeat in Catriona Silvey’s ‘Meet Me in Another Life’; Omar El Akkad views difficulty through the eyes of children; the life of singer Nico is explored and re-appraised by music journalist Jennifer Otter Bickerdike; the muse in Sarvat Hasin’s ‘The Giant Dark’ follows the myth of the Eurydice (& Orpheus) into the underworld; a collection of poems compiled by Andrew Marr is a lyrical look at the British; illustrator Henn Kim poetry is in a visual form; life can be anything but straightforward and Lemn Sissay and Christine McGuinness show remarkable fortitude in dealing with their challenges; singer Frankie Bridge shares her experiences and offers a helping hand; chef Rob Howell gets to the ‘Root’ of great and simple cooking and finally School Teachers (and brothers) Lee & Adam Parkinson offer a light-hearted look at the world of primary education.
Simplicity by Robert William Service
What I seek far yet seldom find
Is large simplicity of mind
In fellow men;
For I have sprouted from the sod,
Like Bobbie Burns, my earthly god,
From plough to pen.
So I refuse my brain to vex
With problems prosy and complex,
Beyond my scope;
To me simplicity is peace,
So I persue it without cease,
And growing hope.
“The world is too much with us,” wrote
Wise Wordsworth, whom I love to quote,
When rhymes are coy;
And simple is the world I see,
With bud and bloom and brook and tree
To give me joy.
