MI5...not

Okay.

I am a naturally curious person. Over the course of my days so far this has manifested itself as a hunger for knowledge and meaning, excellent pattern recognition, a spark of social spontaneity and generally being a nosey parker.

However.
Sometimes I think I might take things too far.
Example.

Several years ago, in one of my many fits of unrealistic enthusiasm, I bought an old second hand book from a great little shop in Weston-super-Mare. It is one of an old 'Teach Yourself' series with a test inside the dust cover which after reading and absorbing the contents you could send off to the publishers, who would in turn say, 'Well Done, Foolish Consumer,' very loudly, or something to that effect.

It is 'Teach Yourself Arabic'.

Now this is an old book....printed in 1943 (it's full of handy phrases like 'I am sending to you the two women from whom you can ask news of your daughter', and 'are you she to whom I entrusted the secret?', and the simply stellar 'I passed a snake the length of which was one cubit') and it contains a tiny slip of paper that looks to be about the same age. It is yellowed and has been folded many times. It's corners are browned, as though someone tried the old apple juice invisible ink trick on it, but it didn't work. The paper itself is letter paper. It has a light threaded pattern to it. On one side is written, in a child's hand, 'my book of Jokes'. On the other, in pen, 'DE3 3BU'.

How enigmatic.

I brought the book into work with me this morning to read at lunchtime (seriously). I had wondered, idly, when I bought the book whether DE3 3BU was a vehicle registration, a postcode or a secret password to an international book smuggling ring (hey, who are you calling over imaginative?), but today of course I have the awesome detective power of the internet at my disposal.

It turns out that 'DE3 3BU' is in fact...the postcode for...wait for it....

Brailsford Golf Club.

So; two separate people - a child (possibly) and an adult, potentially a golf player, (although through another source I have learned that the golf club might be quite new and is built on the site of a farm) used the same scrap of paper to write on, which raises the profile of the adult to golf-playing student of Arabic...possibly a parent, whose book ended up in Weston-super-Mare.

Alternatively, if we take into account both the age of the book (there is a quickly scrawled date on page 12 - 7/12/44, interestingly in the same grade of pencil and at the same sharpness of nib as the child's writing on the bookmark, but it's impossible to be sure about that) then most likely the golf club was a farm. Now call me curious (amongst other things) but what is someone associated with a farm doing learning Arabic in 1944?

Now the town's manor, Ednaston Hall, not five miles from there, has a similar postcode, and it and some farms in the surrounding area were apparently used for covert military training purposes at the time.

See?
Told you.