READING TIME

Time, I think, to cease all my prattling and go away and do some reading instead. The piles of books about the place in need of reading are starting to get both ridiculous in quantity and neglected and dust covered by the lack of attention being paid to them.

Somehow, I feel, all of this acquiring of more books just really has to stop. I occasionally try to convince myself that I’m not allowed to get another one until I’ve finished one, a kind of “one-for-one deal” if you like, but then I discover that I’m weak and feeble and I put down my coin and pick up yet another volume that I’m really interested in reading, add it to the pile and ignore it, safe in the knowledge that because I now have it, I can read it any time I like, so I don’t actually have to read it now.

Even the essentially trashy options offered by the average supermarket can still suck me in when I spot something that looks a bit “interesting” or that the latest release of a thriller series is just out in paperback and is available at the ridiculously low prices they offer.

But then, even reading an article or venturing into an online “chat room” isn’t safe, as references will be made to books that I haven’t previously heard of and I will go looking for them, add them to my personal “wish list” and then constantly check the price to see if it has dropped enough for me to justify the acquisition of it.

Then I order it anyway.

Fear and loathing of the possibilities of the dreaded “This title is no longer available” or simply, as it used to be called, being “out of print”, can fill me with such a twitching potential horror of having missed the boat and years of trudging pointlessly around book fairs and second-hand shops on the “off-chance” I might spot a copy, that my resistance will simply crumble away to dust.

Well it’s either that or paying over the odds at specialist retailers or the more insidious nastiness of ebay and its fretful bidding wars. Usually, in the past, if I did succumb to such folly, I would spot the very volume I had sought in a charity shop for under a quid within days of paying over the odds, such is the ironic life of the avid collector of specific titles.

Of course, the other way around it is never true. You will never just happen upon the volume you seek before the whole rigmarole of being fleeced has occurred. Oh no! That kind of luck or my discovery of a genuine bargain is about as likely as me deciding that I might like to watch an Olympic event (which I don’t, by the way...), only to discover that someone has randomly posted me the very tickets I needed.

Even the momentary weakness of cracking and putting in an online order is fraught with danger and traps for the unwary. “Helpful” labels along the lines of “People who bought that also bought this” can open up a vast range of previously unheard-of volumes of a similar hue which can get so very easily clicked on and added to either the shopping basket (if I’m feeling outrageously weak) or the “wish list” (if I’m having a moment of being made of sterner stuff).

The difficulty, of course, is actually finding the time to do any actual reading. Now that I seem to have committed myself, for good or ill, to writing these regular outpourings of nonsense, those few moments in which I cracked open the smooth pages of a virgin paperback are reduced for me. This particular bit of nonsense which you are now reading was mostly knocked out (apart from the later judicious editing) in a half hour period at a time on a Monday morning before even the milkman had got up, which used to be the insomniac’s witching hour when I would either get up and read or catch up on the backlog of telly.

Happily, at least, the distractions of telly are far fewer these days and I seem to have actually watched just about everything that was ever worth watching via the medium of the “shiny disc” and nothing new that is being produced looks as if it will entice me back in quite the same way.

Equally, those other moments when I used to wait for the clock to tick around to the “official” start of the working day in which I used to devour both literature and fact-based reading is now spent sitting in traffic and swearing at it under my breath in a creative deluge that might have once made even the most radical of authors blush.

So maybe it really is time to pack away my writing head and blow the dust off my reading head instead...

Now, where should I start...?