Not because some guy in California has managed to destroy 12 acres of woodlands by being really bad at golf*. Or because I've just heard that one of the founding members of ELO has died after being crushed by a bale of hay. Those are both stories that sparked my attention today, but the thing which caught me completely off guard recently is this:
My downstairs neighbour, who is a little odd to say the least, recently offered to give me some books he had finished reading. He spends a lot of time hanging around the bus-stop near our flats, and if he's there when I'm waiting for my bus my usual tactic is to say a polite hello and then to bury my head in whatever book I'm currently reading. So when he offered me his off-casts I naturally assumed that he had noticed me doing this, realised I like to read and concluded that I might be someone who would appreciate them.
But then, last night, he delivered the books. Just as I had settled down in front of some rubbish telly there came a knock on my door, and when I opened it, there he was, wild eyes and all, clutching a plastic bag in his hand. I could see the bag contained book shaped objects, and the book-ness of them was confirmed when he grunted something which sounded a bit like "here are those books" as he thrust it at me. I said thank you, he asked for a couple of teabags which I gave him (it seemed like a fair swap) and he went back downstairs.
Then I opened the bag, and the first thing I saw was this:
Regular and long-suffering readers of this blog will understand why my jaw instantly found itself in the vicinity of the floor. Perhaps some of them, if they have been blessed with an extraordinarily large amount of empathy, will even be feeling the same sense of astonishment that I experienced.
For those of you who are more recent visitors (hello! Do pop in from time to time, won't you?) I should explain: this is a book I ordered from Amazon several months ago and then had an agonising and painful wait for, and then had an even more painful and more agonising conversation with Amazon's customer service department when I thought it hadn't arrived. They eventually sent me another copy, but not until I had fired off several strongly worded emails. And also moaned quite a lot about it all here.
Just a coincidence, you may wonder? Well, yes, I suppose there's a chance that the crazy man who lives downstairs from me happened to fall in love with little known French author Jules Renard around the same time as I did, and also ordered his impossible-to-find journal over the internet. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to judge.
But then I dug further into the bag. The next book was another title I had ordered through Amazon but had never (I thought) arrived. Hmmmm. The third, a book which I won in a prize draw several months ago but had never (I thought).....well, you get the idea. Three of the books he was giving me were MY OWN BOOKS.
The other two were books about Jesus. Seriously. I have no idea where he got those ones from, but I'm pretty sure he didn't read them. Or maybe he did, and that's why he decided to give mine back.
He's not exactly the sharpest tool in the playground, and I suppose he might genuinely have made a mistake (I mean three mistakes) by taking my post. Or, and this is quite possible, he just doesn't understand it's not appropriate to steal someone's possessions and then return them by pretending to be doing a good turn. I don't know. It's all very unsettling.
My main problem is deciding what to do the next time I see him. I don't particularly want to confront him, but at the same time it would be quite nice not to have to wait for six months to read any books I order from Amazon in the future. I do have a copy of The Book Thief in my flat which I could give to him by way of return ("hey, thanks for those books - here's one I've finished with!!") but I'm not sure he'd get the sarcasm.
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