Something in the way she moves

Fifty Shades of WTF?

What goes around comes around. Or so they say. Never was this more satisfyingly proven than in this instance, in which the worst book I never read became a sort of throwaway, the kind of thing you give to Goodwill because you're never going to wear/read it again. In spite of the fact that a movie sequel is in the works, if not out already, at least some readers are tiring of the tawdry world of women enjoying getting the shit beat out of them. That kind of mindset sank the Ghomeshi trial sufficiently that he walked free - a fact that hit me so hard that I haven't even been able to write about it, much as I saw it coming. Why this strange phenomenon happened in an Oxfam store in Swansea, Wales, is anyone's guess, but maybe they just have better literary taste there, a hangover (!) from their most illustrious literary son, Dylan Thomas. Well, or at least their drunkest literary son.

Fifty Shades of Grey: the book you literally can’t give away

A branch of Oxfam in Swansea has asked donors to bring ‘less Fifty Shades and more 60s vinyl’. Are Britain’s charity shops stuffed with more bestselling soft porn than they know what to do with?

Emine Saner   @eminesaner

Wednesday 23 March 2016

With almost enough copies of Fifty Shades of Grey to build its own sex dungeon, a branch of Oxfam in Swansea has asked people to stop donating the erotic novel or any of its sequels. “We appreciate all your donations, but less Fifty Shades and more 60s and 70s vinyl would be good,” wrote Phil Broadhurst, the shop’s manager, in a post on Facebook.

For a while, Oxfam published a list of its most-donated authors; between 2009 and 2012, Dan Brown was top. Could EL James and her Fifty Shades have beaten the Da Vinci Code author? “I think Dan Brown is still pipping it, actually, but [Fifty Shades] is up there,” says David Taylor at the Oxfam bookshop in Salisbury. Copies of Fifty Shades there are sent to the local depot for redistribution to other shops; his branch doesn’t sell it. “It sounds snobby, but there are 10 charity shops in our street and you can buy it in any one of them,” he says. “There’s no point in us selling it.”

Other bookshops are not reporting much in the way of bestselling soft porn. “We get our fair share,” says an employee at a British Heart Foundation shop in Edinburgh, but it isn’t one of the shop’s most-donated books. “I don’t even think we’ve got any in,” says the manager of a charity shop in Liverpool.

At the Red Cross bookshop in New Romney in Kent, only two or three copies of Fifty Shades have been donated. The most-donated books, says assistant manager Lorraine Logan, “would probably be Lee Child, Karin Slaughter, that type – crime fiction”. They also get a lot of military history and books about the area. “We’re in a quiet little town,” she says. I think she’s implying it’s perhaps not a hotbed of S&M enthusiasts. Quite what this says about Swansea I’ll leave to the imagination.

. . . And speaking of Swansea, birthplace of that poet once voted "the drunkest man in the world", I found a pub with his name on it in his home town. Reviews were rather tepid, averaging 3.2 out of 5. I've included some of the more memorable ones.

Dylan Thomas - Fayre & Square

Swansea Enterprise Park, Llansamlet, Swansea, United Kingdom

3.2
24 reviews

went there this afternoon, had a "codfather and chips" myself and for my wife, i should have complained immedietly but my wife said to leave it, the batter was overcooked and greasy with not much fish which was mostly grey, it is repeating ...More

Lack of staff and food was not so good for what you pay. Nacho and pulled pork starter with severe lack of pulled pork for £7.. avoid.

Had a gd time and gd staff.plus gd food

My food was cold. And the waitress spilled my desert on me. I complained to the lady in charge and she said she would send me a letter authorising a next free visit for 2. The letter never came. Obviously a ploy to get rid of me and my wife. Customers are not important to them that's why you pay upfront.

Food was ok but wait 10 minutes for drinks food went cold very short staff behind the bar only 1 service

Ok for cheap food and a pint, but poor service due to lack of staff

You get what you pay for. Buy cheap buy twice. Both appropriate for this establishment.

For the price the food is very good.

My 6 year old ill plus me an my partner has had food poising

We had food poisoning after eating here

This is a place we have been visiting for a number of years as it is local. It used to be brilliant then slipped drastically for a time but we believe has recovered. Many other people must think so too as it is usually relatively busy when we go midweek. It is not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but food is USUALLY good and ample portions. We are a family group of older generation i.e. 50's - 90's and they cater for the tastes of the group which is all we want.

Well I can't review the food as after standing at the bar for ages, when the barmaid finally arrived she told me I had to join the queue of about 8 people ordering food, all of who had arrived after me.
I told her I had arrived before them but she wouldn't have it, so I left!

Awful place!!

Ordered food waited 1 hour food was cold and tasted vile never again what a disappointment to us all it tasted bit funny to

POST-POST RUMINATIONS. This can't be true. I mean, the whole story of Fifty Shades in the Oxfam store.

THIS can't be true. . .

. . . and THIS can't be true. . .

. . . or not to this extent, anyway. That igloo-looking thing would require HUNDREDS of donated copies of Fifty Shades. There aren't even that many people in Swansea, let alone older women with dirty minds who were willing to shell out however-many-pence for this thing a few years ago and are now bloody sick of it all.

The copies look identical, and they wouldn't. There would be various different editions, as there always are with bestsellers. Some would be without their dust jackets, or even their covers if the readers had gnawed them off in a fit of frustrated horniness.

This just doesn't make sense to me.

Are these really copies of Fifty Shades at all, or fake books? If they are, they were remaindered by a large retail chain, or perhaps sent over by the publisher (though it's unlikely they'd want to sell their product by donation in an Oxfam store in small-town Wales). Or this is a display in a whole different store, maybe in another part of the world - who's going to know, anyway?

And who in Swansea has the cleverness to make a stack of Fifty Shades symmetrical enough to rival Mr. Whipple's giant tower of Charmin Bathroom Tissue?

I am sure it's a hoax, though even Snopes hasn't caught on yet. I think it's meant to poke good-natured fun at the book, at Swansea, at Oxfam, at - oh never mind. I'm not even sure any more.

We've been Onioned here. Now I feel just a little bit foolish.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Fifty Shades of George

(from The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin by Joan Peyser)

Fifty shades of black (a story of bondage)

 

 

She knew this was the last chance she was going to get to visit her favourite spot. Already leaves were curling under her feet, evening brought on a hint of frost, and she had put on the usual five or six pounds around her hips, a layer of bear-fat for the coming winter.

 

This special place of hers was called Burnish Lake, and she always liked the double-entendre in the name: the coppery surface of the water in the evening, the antique gold of early-fall leaves. Burnish Lake had lots of things going for it, but most of all it had ducks. Swarms of them, and due to the mild climate in these temperate parts they didn’t seem to migrate in the fall. No need. Being social animals, they congregated in swarms around the strange geometric wooden dock that jutted out into the shallow water where they all dabbled and splashed.

 

It was really just a big pond, and this dock – it was more of a boardwalk, really – went on forever. Besides the ducks, all there was to see around here were water lilies. She could imagine how the frogs must sound after dark.
 

 

The child in her came out when she saw those ducks, and she wished she had bread with her, knowing full well that feeding ducks made about as much sense as feeding bears (which she had done once. Cheesies, which the big guy had really relished, until he grabbed the plastic bag out of her hands and ate the whole thing.) Then they would truly swarm, revealing the rather nasty side of ducks and of birds in general, just dinosaurs reborn with all their primitive saurian instincts intact.

 

They were mostly female mallards, she guessed, with a few half-grown babies – juveniles – but no drakes. She looked and looked for the gorgeous iridescent green heads, but did not see one. What, no sultans to keep the harem in order? Guess not. She threw a few stones at them, meanly, watching them “waaak” and scatter.

 

She had her reasons to be mean, and her reasons for wanting to come out here alone and get some fresh air. She hadn’t had fresh air in a while. It hadn’t been her idea to go to the hospital, and in fact most of the time she felt just fine. Better than fine! She was exhilarated, and people were telling her things like, “You look ten years younger. What have you been doing?”

Yes. She felt special, more special than she had ever felt before. She wasn’t really going to act on those feelings, was she? But Burt thought she might.

 

When you’re in a certain state, you don’t know what effect you’re having on others. You’re oblivious. So even though she stepped on every sentence to the point that no one was willing to talk to her, even though she slept barely two hours a night, even though she had lost fifteen pounds (good!), even though she was one step away from sending out the mass email that would change everything (or was it Facebook?) – she didn’t think they needed to take that kind of drastic measure.
 

 

Something wonderful has happened, the email would begin, and I wanted to share it with all my closest and dearest friends. I have received some information recently that is very special, and very exciting. I have suspected this about myself for a very long time, but now it has been confirmed by a Higher Source.  I have been granted the ability to 

 

That was as far as she got. So what the hell was wrong with that? Or of thinking she saw Moses one day in the liquor store? If you think he’s Moses, he IS Moses, her writer friend said to her the other day. She wanted to see Moses again, to talk to him, to ask him just how he got that water out of the rock.

 

Burt kept saying she wouldn’t let him talk, that he couldn’t even get a word in, and that was ridiculous. Burt kept saying she was being abusive, that she was acting like a bitch, but didn’t she have it coming with all the rotten things that had happened to her as a child? Probably. But it bothered Burt to be called a cocksucking fuck-face in front of people.

 

So it was the hospital for a while, again, and medication, again, and more psychiatrists to beguile. She had been seducing psychiatrists (verbally, of course) since the age of fifteen, so she was awfully good at it by now. Most of their patients were so dull, she supposed, that her clever banter and sparkling irony must have been downright stimulating, if in a rather embarrassing way.

 

She hated to leave those ducks, but she had to go to the bathroom. She noticed there was nobody else around, just nobody, and thought it was odd.  Then she remembered the dates on the sign.  She was the very last visitor to Burnish Lake before the season ended. But what about the staff? Nobody around, but it didn’t matter, she didn’t like people anyway and was finished with them. They were all so full of shit.

 

She hated the bathroom here, so primitive, almost a privy. It was just a big plywood box with hardly any light, only a useless burnt-out bulb, and no windows. Just a slot for ventilation, up too high to be of any use. She used the smelly toilet, noticed there was no sink but only hand-sanitizer. Disgusted, she squirted some on her hands and rubbed it in.

 

Was that why the sliding bolt lock wouldn’t move, because her hands were so slippery?

 

Then she remembered there was a much larger sliding bolt on the outside of the door, for when they locked everything up for the winter. To keep out homeless people or whatever. But this was the inside lock, stuck. She wiggled it gently, then a little harder, then wiggled it some more.

 

Panic began to rise in her. Her worst fear, worse than falling or being raped or even of dying, was of being trapped, locked inside an unfamiliar building or unable to get out of some suffocating place. The worst feeling she had in the hospital was the sound of a big heavy institutional door clanging shut behind her. It seemed to happen every time.
 

 

She wiggled some more. Banged. Then shouted. Then shouted some more. But then she remembered that no one was there.


She screamed and screamed. Her throat began to grow raw. And it was getting dark out. The little ventilation slot was greying now, and the whole stinking room was turning into a black box.

 

She would die in here, alone, in a shithouse in the woods. They’d look for a body for a while, then give up. What would they find in the spring? Then she realized that by throwing herself so violently against the door, she had probably bent the bolt so badly that the lock was irrevocably jammed. Only a hammer or screwdriver would get her out of here, and even if there were somebody around, how would they get it to her?
 

 

It got dark so fast. She was tired. There was no air in this place. Panic turned to despair. She was like one of those stupid hikers who goes on a dangerous trail and doesn’t tell anyone. Who knew about Burnish Lake, anyway? Not Burt. He had never even heard of it.

 

It had nothing to do with the poetic word “burnish” anyway, but was the name of some hopelessly dull cocksucker of a statesman who’d been dead 100 years. Nobody gave a fuck about him anyway.

 

She had to fall asleep eventually: her quota was four hours at least, and she didn’t want to set herself back to her Healing the World campaign, in which people from all over the globe would come to her so she could lay her hands on them.

 

 

Bullshit thought, probably, but maybe not. She still didn’t see what was so wrong with it. Lots of those East Indian women all wrapped up in white gauze had people just flocking to them, and nobody said they were crazy. She had stopped a few people on the street and started to explain it to them, and they had pulled away, but weren’t most people full of it anyway? The average IQ is 100, her writer friend said to her, and they both laughed.

 

She had to sleep. She curled up on the dank floor, and all the meds she was on eventually pulled her under.
 

 

At the very bottom of the murky tank of her sleep, footsteps crunched on the grass outside, leaving deep imprints. Someone was humming to himself. He was a little bit happy, mind, but a little bit sad, too. This was always the final thing he did, the very last ritual before closing up for the year.

 

There was a fiddly noise, a wiggling. A little bit stuck, it was. He’d fix that. He gave it the special wiggle it needed to move. He had a way with this lock.

 

There was a thin screech of metal on metal, then the sure-handed slide and thunk of a bolt as it dropped into place. Satisfied, the man turned his head and looked around the place one last time, then headed over to his pickup.