YOU CAN HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS

“The builders are coming! The builders are coming! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”

Easter Saturday morning was spent shifting the many, many books from off the bookshelves in the bedroom up to a place where they would be out of the way, and, despite everything I’ve ever said about such things, when you’re lugging another pile up the stairs for the thirtieth time, and your knees are really starting to remind you of how old you’re actually getting, it becomes as clear as crystal that yes, indeed, you actually can have too many books…

Of course, having made the decision to make a start on the much needed TLC the inside of our crumbling little pile is desperate need of, and then having actually summoned up the courage to ring the builder and get an estimate for the work required, preferrably to be done a room at a time for both practical and financial reasons, it became increasingly obvious that we would have to churn the clutter around a bit to give them some space to actually do the work in.

So, with a lot of reluctance, not least because of a predilection we have towards doing as little as possible with our weekends because of the hellish nature of the average week, the four-day Easter weekend was assigned towards having a bit of a clearout in the first of the rooms designated for a bit of a spruce up, and, because of the sheer quantity of junk we seem to have accumulated, it became increasingly clear that four days may not have been enough time in which to manage it.

Especially with the “Yes… No… Yes… No…” Yoyo effect being used by the NHS with regards to whether my mother ought to be sent home, or not.

When the entire four-day break is consumed by “It will definitely be tomorrow…” it makes it terribly difficult to actually plan anything…

And then there was the slight issue of when the building work might actually begin. We weren’t expecting anything immediate, you understand, especially not with the recent unexpected wintry weather putting the kibosh on pretty much any work that they may already have been doing, but we did have the sneaking suspicion that if we did nothing at all there was almost bound to be a phone call telling us that they would be arriving tomorrow, even though, in real terms, I know that I’m now going to be looking at an empty room and carefully manoeuvring my way around piles of books for the foreseeable future.

Already I find myself desperate to look up a particular fact in a book that is somewhere behind those piles and I’m veritably twitching at the possibility of “just moving a few of them” in order to see whether I can actually get to the one I want, if it is, of course, actually on the shelf I think it is…

But that way chaos (or at least a book avalanche) lies… So you see, it is with some actual wisdom, gained from genuine real experience, that I am able to state quite categorically that you can, in all honesty, have too many books…