If it's Thursday, it must be tea and scones with cream and jam at the Country Women's Association in Moruya - and so it was again this Thursday. Of course, for me the main attraction is their beautiful Book Nook which always reveals some hidden gems.
This week, in between bites of scones smothered in cream and jam, I "re-homed" several magical books: "A World Lit Only By Fire - The Medieval Mind & the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age" by William Manchester; Wilfred Thesiger's "Arabian Sands"; and, for a bit of light reading, Billy Connolly's "Rambling Man - My Life on the Road".
I already had Thesiger's classic as a beautiful - and very expensive - hardcover, but, with my penchant for desolate places, I felt compelled to give this Penguin edition a new home as I couldn't imagine anyone else in Moruya being interested in it. And until I checked YouTube for a possible audiobook - which exists; click here for a "prelisten" - I had no idea that they had made a movie - of sorts - out of Thesiger's book:
I almost picked up a copy Charmian Clift's "Peel Me A Lotus" for the same reason I had picked up "Arabian Sands". It's a charming book about her and her husband George Johnston's life on the Greek island of Hydra. Few people still remember her writing, and her book my turn yellow in the Book Nook, but Padma had called me back for more tea and scones.
After her return from Greece in 1964, Charmian Clift wrote a weekly column which appeared on Thursday ("If it's Thursday ...") in the Sydney Morning Herald, and on Saturday in the Melbourne Herald. They were later collected and published in "Images in Aspic", "The World of Charmian Clift", "Trouble in Lotus Land", and "Being Alone With Oneself". When she died in 1969, one of her ‘Thursday ladies’ wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald saying that ‘Thursday won't be Thursday any more’.
For us, Thursday won't be Thursday unless we have some tea and scones with cream and jam at the Country Women's Association in Moruya.
