I had got up early to phone a supplier who had received the wrong order from the carpenter I had contracted to rebuild my verandah. Not being able to get through on the phone, I shaved and showered and was just about to drive into town when he returned my call, and I was lucky to cancel the order just in time. Being all dressed up with nowhere to go, I said to Padma, "Let's drive to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowling club".
Which is what we did but, of course, no visit to Ulladulla is complete without a visit to my favourite bookshops, of which there are three: the Uniting Church op-shop, Vinnies, and the Lions Preloved Bookshop.
I came away with "Knowing What We Know Now" by Simon Winchester, which had been released only a couple of years earlier but here it was already in a second-hand opshop, and in mint condition at that. Then there was "Seriously Curious - The Facts and Figures that Turn Your World Upside Down", "Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour of Europe", and Paulo Coelho's "The Pilgrimage" along the road to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (which is a walk I have always wanted to do but now never will).
Then I found "Understanding the Woman in Your Life" by Steve Vinay Gunther (written by a man???), and I asked Padma, "Should I buy this?"
"It's too late for that!" she said, and so I spent the two dollars I had saved on that transaction, on Peter Schweizer's "Secret Empires", which is about America's top politicians' scams to end all scams. It's too late for us to do anything about that, too, but it's still worth reading about it.
