Books and reading

St Hyppolyte
Yesterday's weather: Mostly sunny, hot, quite heavy. Until midnight when it clouded over so we couldn't see the meteors.

We had a lovely afternoon yesterday. We met face to face for the first time with our book group. The group is still in its infancy and is quite small. I suppose the official membership is 8 but the group organiser invited us all to lunch yesterday afternoon and we found that, in fact, most of our partners are also reading, so that almost doubles it. Eleven of us met for lunch to choose books for the next three months.

It is much easier for us to buy books in advance as it saves on postage if we can order several at one time from Amazon in the UK. Also, some of us are lucky enough to live close to each other so we can share books too. Which, of course helps keep the paper mountain down.

We had a cull of books before we moved in, but we still manage to have too many, and I've just ordered another 5! The trouble is that three of us had 4 books each to suggest and it was very difficult to select them. I suspect we are not the only ones from the group who want to read more than one book from each selection.

As is normal with us retired folk when meeting others for the first time, our conversations turned to 'the previous life'. 'Do you miss work?' was one of the more popular questions. 'Not at all' was the usual answer. 'All those meetings. God, no, I don't miss those'.

It struck me later as very amusing that we had all just got together for the first time for .......... a meeting!