Herons, Hoodies and Hiking up to Flat 28

 Well....first and foremost, Bill was out and hunting in all his glory. What a sport!

We went out in the late afternoon for a walk, and without realizing it, had walked nearly three miles. It was a gorgeous day, with temperatures in the 60's, occasional sprinkles from a gorgeous English sky.

We walked through the center of town and beyond through the various colleges. This is a marvelous place. There were crowds of people everywhere. It is as if Oxford has just awakened from a deep sleep and is coming alive. I can't tell the tourists from the regular denizens here, but everyone seems enormously happy to be out and about.

SK has an app on his phone that identifies plants and trees.  He uses it every time we go out.

In the afternoon, our elders brought us each a hoody, which they had printed. It is lovely. It has the Oxford seal on, and the English London Mission logo on the back. On the front it says "Oxford District." They are probably a little too warm for right now, unless it gets cold again. The nighttime temperatures are in the 50's.

Last week, our car battery died, and SK put on the apartment complex feed that he needed help with jumper cables and a kick start. A very kindly man replied that he would help. His name is Peter, and he lives on the other side of the horseshoe-shaped complex. He got the car going. This week, he put a charming post in the apartment feed that he is at last doing the unthinkable - he is literally throwing away his lifetime collection of books. He is 80 years old.

He said there will be a trash bin here next week, and he is tossing them all in. I guess he has asked around and no one is buying books - of any sort. He invited all who live here to come get books they might like to have. SK thought we ought to - but at this point, anything that weighs an ounce or more is too much to get into our suitcases. And books weigh considerably more than an ounce.

We went over. He is on the fourth floor in a gorgeous apartment with a whole wall of windows -  stunning natural light flooding through. The floors, couches, tables, every surface were all stacked high with books of every sort, except fiction - from what I could see.

Peter showed us around and led me to a stack of art books. There were a lot of chemistry and science books, and a whole lot of very scholarly books. He said he had kept back twelve books that he would keep if he were to ever be stranded on a desert island.

Visions of War and Peace and Les Miserables and of course the Bible danced in my head as I inquired what the books were He showed me the stack. Most were about Math and Scientific procedures. His favorite is one full of math problems. He said with delight that he would never get bored.

He is a proper English gentleman, soft-spoken and kindly. I chose ten of the heaviest tomes in the apartment! Huge volumes about Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. He seemed pleased that we would want them. He said his wife's sons didn't want any of them, and as you can imagine, the science and chemistry books are probably all out of date.

As we left, he handed us book of his own. I think he has written several. He was a professor of chemistry at Oxford until retiring twelve years ago.

SK has arranged for the young elders to come next Tuesday and carry them all down to the dumpster - called a skip or rubbish bin here. After looking at all those books, I was grateful that the elders will do that.