Last week, on the way back from Manly beach to the ferry if you don't mind darling, I spotted a bookshop. I can sense bookshops, just like birds with which way South is.

Anyway. So the bookshop is called Desire Books and it has that warm orange glow that brings you across from the other side of the street to "just have a look". In the window, there was this display. There was a sign on the window that said, NAME THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THESE BOOKS AND WIN ONE OF THEM.

Now, let me say that when Tim recently held a trivia night, I couldn't answer the question about what "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" was the first sentence of. For someone who majored in English, that's not terribly impressive. So when I smugly told Stewart in Manly that I definitely knew what it was that linked the books in the display, I made him promise not to make me go in and say it to the guy in the bookshop.

So Stewart went in and said it to the guy in the bookshop. And - after some discussion regarding the expression of the answer and the terms of reference of the sign on the front window - it was deemed, graciously, to be correct. So then Stew, who had pretended to have thought of the answer himself, had to select a book from the collection.

So now I'm reading Anais Ninn.

And anyway the guy in the bookshop said he'd been doing the "Guess the connection" display in the front window for years. He said it was IMPOSSIBLE to think of new displays. I immediately thought of three or four very (I thought) witty and clever ones he never would have thought of, all of which he had done several variations of. So if you think of any, let me know. I'm making a list. And if you're in Manly, go there. It's a second-hand bookshop with first editions and gorgeous old hard back copies of books they don't really want to sell. It also has a table you can sit at, with copies of The Believer on it and tea cup stains in the wood.

Another reason to love Melbourne: yesterday I purchased two torsos made of plastic (one lovely lady and one hunk of man with a vineleaf covering his bits) for seven bucks fifty each. My next few costume parties just got a hell of a lot easier. Also, I got a single bed head with a light in it (dunno, but I'm sure it will be useful) for $2, a sun hat with half a (strange) sentence on it (fifty cents), a massive big bunch of fake daisies in a basket (free, sort of forced on me), an instamatic camera with film in it that had been taking photos of people's feet all day (fifty cents), and all because the ladies at the garage sale down the road had imbibed a significant quantity of wine. "Are you sure you don't want an orange doily and a small, dusty religious figure?" they asked as I left.

Also, went to the Writers' Festival, which was fun because it was opening and there were books and also many fabulous people (ie my friends).

Yay for the purple sky.