Within minutes of our arrival, Rob our kind and helpful Harbour Master reminded us that the Book Markets were on Sunday, which in the fullness of time turned out to be today.
It must be said that at the time our heads were in a flood of memories of yesteryear and our ears were not at all pricked up at the prospect of visiting another market, not even when he added that there are often stalls with records as well. The only records we keep these days are the absolute minimum required by the tax office.
We were not prepared for the shock of just how many stalls there would be, nor how many people would be flocking to the old town to visit. More than a thousand people selling books by our count, take up very many kilometres of every main thoroughfare, and by not long after lunch o’clock it seemed that every stall had more than a thousand customers. Even by three in the afternoon, the carparking stations on the city perimeter had lengthy queues waiting to enter.
We didn’t buy, nor mostly did we mostly even stop to look. Simply ambling through the throng consumed the greater portion of that mythical 10,000 steps that neither of us aspire to reaching even on the best of days.
We’d absorbed enough of whatever one absorbs when surrounded by piles of lovely printed things, that by the end of the day, one of us was content to sit for the afternoon reading from the other’s e-reader. The other, unsure why he’d offered her his so quickly when hers mysteriously remained in Ireland last month, was content to scratch around and do anything but keep this blog up to date.
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