I had lunch on Southbank in the CBD with friends during the week. I wasn’t going to do any shopping but I ended up doing a survey after lunch and she gave me a coffee voucher for my trouble…slight mistake as in wandering around looking for somewhere to redeem it I found Mary Martin.

Mary Martin Bookshop instantly takes me back to my childhood, it was one of the family’s favourite haunts as they had good books at good prices, this was no different. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the Books We Love wall with lots of tags written by the staff.

Wandering further around the shop I came across an old friend from when I used to sell pre-loved books online. Grug is a lovely range of books with simple words and a simple layout, they’re great for teaching people to read and the character is loveable. Until they republished them a couple of years ago they were really hard to find and therefore fairly expensive when you did find them. I didn’t see the Grug Dictionary so if you have one of those and you don’t want it any more, stick it on eBay.

Also in the CBD the lady in Mary Martin told me I needed to cross the bridge again and take photos of these locks. They’re called Love Locks and can be found in all sorts of places around the world. Here’s a list of locations found in Wikipedia.

Slightly nicer imagery than this installation we found in Boston. A large number of Dog Tags it’s there to honour the people who have lost their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars both armed forces and civilians. There was a similar one on a fence also in Boston to commemorate the bombs during the marathon in April of this year. I can’t find a photo of it but it was very emotional and was made up of rags just tied onto the fence.