Although all this packing and unpacking is a nuisance in a perverse way I enjoy it as the only thing that gives me greater pleasure than packing things away 'correctly' (I practically drool my way through the storage section of IKEA) is the arranging and rearranging of my 'things'. So why if I'm in 'sorting' heaven, and importantly in a lovely new house who everyone (including the cat) feel utterly at home in straight away, do I find myself without a sense of closure. Because I have one grand drawback - books!
For the first time in my life I own a property which has enough space to comfortably accommodate all my books (and boy do I have a lot of them). You can blame my father for this as he also is a great collector of the printed word. So I have inherited the 'book' gene that not only compels me to read, hoard and worship these paper-packed-pleasures but also to revere them. It has been drummed into me from an early age never to fold down corners, lick your thumb to turn a page or over-bend a spine (Jeremy Goode I feel your pain) But a personal quirk of my own is getting the books just right on the shelves.
There are two ways of tackling the problem (three is you employ the dewey decimal system but even I'm not that bad!). The first is to adopt a neat-freak approach by either sorting alphabetically (by author or title) or by size or, and some people do do this, by colour! The other is the total scatter gun approach of chucking any book in any order anywhere, as long as they are on a shelf and sometimes not even that. I'm afraid I'm a little too anal for the second approach, but at the same time I love the effect. It always reminds me of a second-hand bookshop, the place in the world were I am probably the most happy. For my fortieth birthday I took a weekend trip to Hay-on-Wye to simply indulge the pleasure of being in in a town where there is a bookshop on every corner and the tomes outnumber the residents 10,000 to 1.
My shelf stacking style therefore has elements of both approaches. I need that slightly haphazard look as a result of just a hint of higgledy with a dash of piggledy. But at the same time I need to be able to find books at a moments notice. Because you never know when you'll need to reread 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' for the hundredth time or the first two stories of G K Chesterton's 'The Innocence of Father Brown'. Or the poem by E E Cummings that mentions the universe next door. Or remind yourself just how superior Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is compared to the crap movie. Or look again for the clues in 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'. Or... well you get the idea.
So if I have the will, the space and most certainly the books where's the rub you may ask? The problem is that as yet I just don't have the shelves. We have grand plans for shelving all over the place and I'm already seeing in my mind certain books in certain rooms but as yet, nothing. Apparently there are more important thing to consider such as heating, wiring and food! (Food! Why can't the kids live on beans for a month? Is that too much to ask? Obviously yes.)
So all my ideas will have to remain just that for now and the books will just have to stay in their boxes. As the saying goes "The best laid plans of mice and men... er..."
(Damn it!...Which crate has the quotations book in it?...Oh!... Pants!...)
...well, it probably has something to do with cheese but I'm not committing myself...
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