A country writing holiday
This past week I went away for a few wonderful days in Daylesford Victoria (Tuesday's post was just a scheduled decoy). Back in August I joined the Penguin Books Australia facebook page, just because it came up somewhere and I thought, well I like them so why not? They happened to be running a competition to see who could guess how many popular penguin books there were in the library featured in this photo. So I did some sophisticated counting and multiplication, and I won!
What I won was two nights accomodation in the White House (worth a look), which contains this library. Initially I wondered what I was going to do with two nights accomodation in one queensize room down in country Victoria, because it didn't include transport and I didn't really fancy going by myself. But it looked like a lovely place to go and write (if you clicked through to the website you will see why) so I decided to do something crazy and ask a little group of people I have been getting together with semi-regularly this year to work on a writing project of sorts, and see if I could pay extra for the use of the other rooms (there is this queer set-up where you have the house to yourself, but pay for the use of each bedroom). So I asked them and to my great delight they were all keen to come and even suggested driving down.
The house was booked out for weekends for the rest of the year and I thought we wouldn't actually do this for ages, but when I asked for available dates this week came up, and to my surprise again it worked with the others to go midweek, so off we went on a random little road trip.
Of course, all of this happened before I was aware of any sort of marketing campaign for Daylesford, or the advertisement that prompted this article by Phillip Jensen. It seems there are often two responses to such controversies: you either boycott something about it and never holiday in Daylesford in your life on principle, or you engage in "culturally relevant" research and go right in to be informed. We opted for the latter in this case (albeit unwittingly). If there is going to be a hoo-hah about a lovely little town in Victoria and somebody needs to go and see what all the fuss is about, then it might as well be us! :)
Over the next few days I might tell you more and post some photos of the trip, but for now I thought I would give you the opportunity to test your Bookshelf IQ and see if you can guess how many books there are in this library. (No digging back through facebook and cheating!)