As you might notice, it’s late, it’s a crap photo and it’s a very grumpy Linda typing this.

I would not have believed how expensive text books are before I started needing to buy them for Uni. These were all bought second-hand and still the bottom two cost £80 for the pair. They are meaty tomes and frankly the best I can say about them is that they are heavy going but useful. A less good aspect is that they were bought described as “good” condition but both of them are full of underlined text, highlighted text and notes in the margins. Call me old-fashioned but I was brought up to show my books a bit more respect than that.

The top one I consider to be a small triumph even though that is petty and pointless point-scoring on my behalf. It’s written by a lecturer at my Uni. In a masterful stroke of self-promotion, it was the recommended text for a module led by him. He claimed that he wouldn’t profit from us all having to scurry out and buy it because he’d given away his royalties in exchange for his publisher supplying a copy to every school in the USA. But of course what he failed to mention was that he would have more credibility with his publisher and therefore be more likely to be commissioned to write another book if sales of this one are good. I really don’t like being forced into a purchase of this type so I was determined to buy it second hand. I scoured t’interweb for the cheapest copy I could find and found one for 50p – yee haa – job done. Got the book for minimal payout. Didn’t get logged towards the sales of the book. But the best bit was the fact that when it came it was stamped with a library mark of a school library in guess where – yep, the USA. So, at least in the case of the book I got, the publisher had done what had been asked and provided a free copy to the school and they had, bless them, sold it on to me for a pittance. You may think it’s really childish to be so thrilled to have comprehensively beaten the system but I am. Especially because I intend to sell it online myself in a couple of weeks to someone else and I doubt if I’ll get less for it than my money back.

Frogs… on the other hand is a cheap (£3 second hand), excellent read. It’s even written in “English” rather than that indecipherable language “science”, which is something that most text books fail to do. Science truly is the one remaining bastion of impenetrable language, used to make the rest of us all feel idiotic. Hell’s teeth – even drug companies are all writing their materials in plain English now – although I suspect that is because they have been forced to.

I think the frustration of trying to untangle delightful subjects like species concepts and pre-zygotic reproductive isolation is getting to me…