Logic refresher

The beach cafe at Yaverland was shut today, so we thought to take our after-beach tea at the fine café at Brading Roman Villa. It was also in the back of our minds that they had a rack of second hand books at the back, a rack from which I think I bought a book about Alexander the Great last year.

Rack all present and correct, containing mainly ladies' holiday fiction but also the book snapped left, more suitable for gentlemen's holiday reading. From the late sixties, a well produced book, much better than one is apt to get nowadays, with proper paper and proper binding. Both interesting and salutary to read - or at least glance at - an introductory text to something one actually knew something about fifty years ago. With one of the various plus points being that the short bibliography includes a book which I once used and which still resides on our bookshelves.

Checking with Amazon I find that they will sell me one for just over £2, possibly a modern reprint, but also that an outfit called Ergode Books, of Texas, will sell me one for £85.82 + £5.81 delivery. Possibly a misprint, possibly trying it on, which all goes to show that you do need to be careful with Amazon.

Perhaps, over a drop of something that warms later today, I shall speculate how this particular book wound up in Brading Roman Villa. A retired mathematics teacher from one of the islands secondary schools? Perhaps the Ryde School where my first form teacher in my secondary school wound up as head master? One Kenneth Symons, whom I must have greatly angered by my adolescently negative attitude to his beloved CCF. I never knew that: '... In 1943 Keith was called up; on D-Day, at the age of 20, he commanded three Landing Craft Tanks and landed the 6th Battalion Green Howards on Gold Beach. He made a total of 14 Channel crossings ...' - with the minesweepers which I did know about coming later. Perhaps, like many veterans, he preferred to leave much of the past in the past.

For the record, I donated £2 to the Villa for a book which might have cost £6.25 new.

PS: while we were out today, an important email came in from English Heritage telling me that the Osborne Horse Trials scheduled for later in the month have been cancelled. As it happens, they were to have taken place just after we leave, but to think that our planned trip to visit V&A's soft porn might have included a herd of horsey people. See reference 3.

Reference 1: An introduction to symbolic logic - John L. Pollock - 1969. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. New York.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-work-for-sundays.html. Confirmation regarding Alexander the Great.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/snippets-from-guardian.html.