ISOLATED BUT HAPPY

We are not abandoned in the current crisis but we may be alone. Each off us can find much to enjoy during this enforced solitude and many ways have been suggested. Having sorted out an enormous collection of Compact Discs (CDs to you, perhaps) I have begun to do the same to the much greater collection of books. This is a supreme task because however good one’s intentions at the start, the way is strewn with side paths that can take you way from your original target which, let me remind you, was to sort out the books.

You will probably find books in the bedrooms, by the beds, heaped on the chests of drawers, under the beds and on the windowsills. You will find them on bookshelves, of course, but maybe in china cupboards, attics, boxes in box rooms, and on the floor by your favourite television chair. Where to begin? Well, it does not really matter because you are going to be side tracked anyway.

I began with the main bookshelf along one whole wall in the TV Room and was immediately side-tracked. On the bottom shelf I found a selection of nature books on wildflowers, trees, and butterflies. I pulled out Keeble Martin’s Concise

British Flora, a wonderful book with illustrations of 1486 species of British wild flower all beautifully painted. I flipped it open and began to look page by page of the fine illustrated jewels. Then I remembered a wild flower that was blooming abundantly in Denston recently and I wanted to know its name.

Taking the book to the favourite chair I began to search, flipping the pages one by one and seeing plants I had never known before. Getting to the end I had to start gain at the beginning. How frustrating! I had known the name when I was a boy but now it seemed beyond me. Three or four times I travelled though the book until I realised the best part of an hour had passed.

Returning to the section of nature books, there was a volume I did not remember seeing before. Its title is “

Herbs for the Mediaeval Household” - not something one would think was a real "must have" sort of book. The book is copyright, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and dated 1943 so it is not something you will pickup easily. The herbs are described as in a German Herbal of 1485 and include Basil and Borage, Salvia and Hysop, Mallows and Marigold and all the herbs itemised have wonderful descriptions of their cultivation, use and cures. This is another book to get lost in.

For example did you know, that “even to look marigolds will draw evil humours out of the head and strengthen the eyesight“? Whereas overeating basil will "dull the eyesight”. Cumin, on the other hand has the virtue “to destroy wicked winds and other evils in a man’s stomach“.

The pretty spring aconite has unimagined properties: "Make cakes of paste and roasted cheese and powdered aconite and set these near to holes where rats dwell”, so a sure poison then. I remember hearing of a famous old murder in which seven priests were assembled to be interviewed the following day and one selected for preferment. They ate well but in the morning only one survived as the others had been poisoned with aconite root in their stew. I had better leave this subject before becoming an accessory!

Suffice it to say another hour was spent happily browsing this, my only second book, on a day dedicated to "Sorting the Books”. Never mind there is always tomorow.