As foretold in these pages yesterday, I have spent today cleaning.
This was a prolonged task, because I have been idle for some time, and some things, like the bath, had become truly horrible in the meantime.
The thing with the bath is that whilst the weather has been so wonderfully warm, none of us have bothered with any more than the minimum of footwear. Flip-flops and sandals have been the thing.
Going almost barefoot in a town that has become dusty with drought is a grubby affair, and when those six pairs of grime-encrusted feet have stepped into the bath at the end of the day, they have each left their mark.
In fact they had made lots of marks, most of them black. Some scrubbing was called for.
I shall not bore you with tedious descriptions of cleaning, although it was very much the theme of the day. Even the children decided to reorganise their bedrooms, and joined me in emptying drawers and filling dustbin bags with their now-redundant outgrown clothes and retired toys. Buzz Lightyear has firmly gone into the bag for the tip, along with all of the other junk.
Since we are going to go to the tip tomorrow, I took the opportunity to do some clearing of my own, and scoured through my bookshelves to clear some space.
I resolved that anything that I knew I would never, ever, read again, must go.
This is so difficult.
It is especially difficult, I realised today, because I had several books that I had no intention whatsoever of re-reading, and some of which I had only given a cursory scan in the first place.
The problem appears to be that I have a very cosy little picture of myself as being the sort of intellectually aware person who has a wide and eclectic collection of literature on my shelves.
Imagine if somebody else looked at them one day, how very impressed they would be to see that as well as the usual range of Harry Potter and Jilly Cooper and Terry Pratchett, I had lots of very clever books, about things like the ancient Greek constitution, and evolution, and the beginnings of the Universe, and Culpeper’s Herbal, and Celtic legends, and the causes of the war, and the causes of another war, and a full range of women’s authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Atwood. What a brilliantly well-informed person they would know me to be.
Add to that some political biographies, writings about almost every religion under the sun, and a host of philosophical musings on almost every subject imaginable, some modern poetry, reference books to help me identify wildlife, and dozens of novels that I had known that I should read because Radio Four had told me so, but did not enjoy at all.
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a book intended to make shooting yourself look like an attractive option.
The Internet is a marvellous thing. I never need to look anything up in a book any more. If I want to know something, I type the question into Google.
This has made an eclectic book collection almost completely redundant. I never look at much of it, and probably never will again.
Worse, much of it has become outdated.
If I wanted a hundred-year-old remedy for piles, or to know how astronomers in the nineteen seventies thought the universe was made, or to read what Greenpeace thought that I should do to save the planet in nineteen eighty, it was all there on my bookshelves.
I could have copied an ancient Egyptian pyramid enchantment, identified different species of vole, learned to tie useful knots or bake a naan bread.
I didn’t think I needed any of this information any more.
In any case, most of it is in very small print, which I can’t read any more. I can with my strongest glasses and a bright light, but on the whole it is too difficult, and so I don’t bother. It has got to be a very thrilling read to make small print acceptable.
I threw it all away.
Not all my books, obviously. I have still got enough to fill the back of a small removal wagon. Those are the ones that I actually like.
Dust flew everywhere. I have not wiped along the tops of the books for several years.
After a while, I enlivened the afternoon a bit by falling off the desk. This served me right for being self-important and filling out of reach shelves with books beyond my intellectual capacity.
Number Two Daughter made supportive noises, and Oliver was dispatched to bring a bag of something cold out of the freezer to put on the enormous lump on my shin. He came back with some turkey steaks, which seemed to work reasonably well, and I staggered around for a while, feeling jarred and bashed, and sorry for myself.
I stopped throwing books away then, and stayed at floor level. I have got two whole empty shelves.
We are going to go to Kendal tomorrow, and anything that the second-hand bookshop does not want can jolly well go to the tip.
It has all felt very cleansing. It is a joyful release to throw away things that one does not really want.
I do not even mind that nobody will ever know again what an intellectual I am.
Ah well.
