Buy More Books - And Cough Medicine!

Scenes like this (and no, I wasn't there yesterday) are, I find, at once guiltily exciting and decidedly unsettling - not only in their affront to one's (well, my) inner librarian, but in presenting the worrying image of the collapse of a corner of the book trade. As an Amazon Marketplace regular, I've had books from Bookbarn in the past - invariably astoundingly cheap, usually in good nick - and I'd hate to think that the demise of this pretty vast operation is a sign of things to come. It must be a very low-margin business when books are priced as low as 1p, as they are all over Amazon Marketplace. I guess there's only one thing for it - it is now incumbent on us all to buy even more books and keep these useful and amazingly good value operations going...
Meanwhile, this 'story' somehow found its way to the top of the news agenda overnight - well, it's not as if anything's happening in the world just now, is it? As well as being no news - it's been known for years that most cough and cold remedies, for adults or children, are clinically useless and can have adverse reactions - it's bound to spark yet another shelf-clearing panic, and no doubt present pharmacists with queues of anxious parents, who will have to be fobbed off with the only 'safe' (really?) medications, paracetamol and ibuprofen. Nice work... Surely the main point of cough and cold treatments is that they feel good and syrupy, clinging to the throat and easing it a bit - and that, with luck, they'll go some way to knocking you out. My own favourite is this classic, full of reassuringly old-fashioned ingredients, including both chloroform and ether - a few swigs of that and you're on your way. Stock up before it's banned.