My colleague Tom is retiring. He is in his last weeks, and he has started tidying up his office. He has a lot of books that he doesn't want to take home. He is now going around the corridor encouraging everyone to come into his office and raid his book cupboards. And I was included in that.
I got some good loot! A combination of things I find interesting such as the life of Fridtjof Nansen, but also a lot of text books for dummies about physics applied to climate, the ocean and the atmosphere. Tom is actually a physicist by training; he probably never needed those books, but might have reviewed them, and therefore ended up owning them. I (quite unlike him) would actually learn something if I read them. I'm not quite sure when I will do that, but well, for now I can just put them in my office. I made so much shelf space when I was getting ready for my foraminifera encyclopaedia I can afford to adopt a few books, even if I'm not sure I would do something useful with them!
