Mayday! - Booking Through Thursday

This week's Booking Through Thursday asks:

Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

OK. So I'm in Tesco doing the weekly shop and I get the 'Go to the airport' call. I buy a ticket for the shuttle to London and wait for the flight to be called. And I'm bookless. Now, since this is a family emergency, I'm probably too stressed-out to read and will spend the time catastrophising myself into a frenzy. If sanity does rear its head, however, I'll realise that the best thing I can do is go to the bookstore at the airport and buy Dickens or Austen. They're stories I know but am happy to read again and are very wordy so needing me to pay attention when reading. Reading is my preferred stress-reliever so reading is the best thing I can do in this situation.

Of course, when I get to London it turns out all to be a mistake and everyone's fine. 'Cause my imagination's like that ...

Booking Through Thursday

This week, Booking Through Thursday asks:

I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

I generally guess what the word means from the context and carry on reading. If my understanding of what I read is impaired then I'll stop and look up the word but generally I'm able to keep right on truckin'.