Hunting In Circles
Entry posted by caldrail
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Man the Hunter must live by his instincts. The smallest detail of his enviroment can make the difference between life or death in the wild animal infested wilderness in which he survives by wits alone. The Swindon Library isn't exactly a wilderness, though you do get a few animals inhabiting the computer cubicles, and if I were honest the most deadly thing in there is a boring book.
My primeval hunting instincts were aroused by the realisation that everything was quiet... Too quiet... And so it turned out to be. Having ascended the stairs to the hallowed halls of the second floor I discovered all the computers were down for scheduled maintenance. That was why no-one bothered to turn up. Good grief, who goes to a modern library to read books?
Rare Books of the Week
In fact, Swindon's main library does have some rare books on display in a glass case. One is an account of the first ever balloon flight in England, made by Vincent Lunardi in 1784 in front of a huge crowd. He was secretary to the Neapolitan Ambassador in Britain and one suspects he found his lucrative job incredibly boring. Either that or the Kingdom of Naples was attempting bomb London in a startlingly prophetic adventure. Had Lunardi also invented a bomb, we might well have been in trouble.
Another is a suprisingly pristine copy of Jules Vernes first ever book, Five Weeks In A Balloon, published in 1863. One wonders where he got the inspiration. Of course five weeks is a long time to be stuck in a balloon with an Italian politician, so I guess Jules Verne spiced the story up a little and turned him into a mad dictator hell bent on taking over the world. It is interesting that James Bond was fighting the same kind of villain a century later. Double Oh Seven is of course the modern personification of Man the Hunter. And so literary evolution brings us full circle back to page one.
Oh brilliant. That means someone is going to reinvent Harry Potter all over again...
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