It's a pleasant, almost warm day - with the feeling of returning spring about it. Yet again, I am in the ante-room of a large secondhand bookshop, looking through great miscellaneous heaps of cheapos and rejects which never made it into the (comparative) sanity and order of the main store. I've lost count of how many things I have found here and taken away over the years - and if some of them were fool's gold, well, many turned out to be the genuine (if metaphorical) article, and the whole enterprise always has about it the air of a treasure hunt. One simply never knows what might not turn up next.

Why, for instance, has the owner discarded out here, on offer to all-comers for a mere ninety-five pence, this album of richly annotated photographs of deep sky phenomena? True, it's some twenty years old by now - but most of what we are dealing with here lies (un)comfortably on the far side of ten thousand light-years away. From where we're at present standing - perhaps wondering why we have come through into the kitchen again; perhaps jumping up and down in the street, demanding that some-body should be killed for causing offence; perhaps even flicking through a book, halfway down a lane - not a lot will have had enough time to alter its appearance. (Even if it all seems to amount to one immense, end-less, unrelenting shudder of process.)

Is this or is ...