The Curse is Come Again!

The imminent arrival of visitors is a great incentive to tidiness. Even tidiness that they are unlikely to see.

The third floor is like some unreal set for ‘unpacking chaos’ artfully created by an art teacher for a class still life examination. Dismantled Christmas trees jostle for space with the final unopened boxes of Pickford’s packed books; Christmas decorations spill from plastic cases to land incongruously on chairs which are orphans from the living room; miscellaneous electronic equipment sits on sheaves of papers which encompass almost the whole of my professional life. Chaos personified.

The solution (leaving aside Toni’s repeated encouragement to feed all extraneous material to the flames) is of course more bookcases. To fit into spaces which do not really exist.

And it is that word ‘really’ that gives one hope. ‘Really’ does not mean that there is absolutely not a single space into which a bookcase could fit.

So I went (alone) to IKEA and bought more. Bought more after measuring carefully (admittedly using a tie rather than a tape measure) to ensure that they would fit in their magicked ‘spaces.’

It was at that point that magic deserted me. I constructed the first of the Tardis cases and gently placed it into position. Where it didn’t fit. So I pressed gently to ensure its easy slide along the tiled floor into position. And gouged out a chunk of the ceiling. I then attacked the top of the book case with a knife, a fret saw and a file. It only, I assured myself, needed the slightest of adjustments and it would fit perfectly. The loss of another chunk of the ceiling assured me that it was not the case. I attacked anew and the case eventually fitted. Though it’s going to take another lump of mortar to release it from its snug fit!

Hurriedly fitting the shelves and even more hurriedly filling them with books allowed me to jettison four Pickford’s boxes from the terrace and clear space in the maelstrom of sheer things cluttering up the floor.

The next bookcase was a half size version and much easier to assemble apart from the flimsy back of the unit which was supposed to fit into the pre-formed grooves to accommodate it. It didn’t and it took someone with the professional patience of Toni’s sister to show me that with gentle persuasion and a belief that it would fit, that everything was possible.

Two shelves up. Books laid out. Still boxes to go. So the final bookcase on the third floor was constructed. This is a full height but a half width thing. It was supposed to fit beside its ‘snugly’ wedged full sized partner, but I felt that pushing another unit into that space would result in structural damage.

It now stands in front of one of the French doors onto the terrace – and all books from the boxes at this level are now out; or out and about to be more accurate. There are clearly books which h I am unlikely to use now; books which are only useful if you are teaching a literature based examination course at GCSE and AS or A2 level. And the chances of that are, to put it mildly, remote.

So the books have to be, or could be, or must be disposed of.

I can foresee an almost endless trundling of a collection of books whose use (even in Britain) is limited, all around institutions in Barcelona.

Perhaps I should simply bite the bullet or break the conditioning of a lifetime and (tell it not in Garth!) simply throw the books I don’t want away.

Almost any other solution is going to mean that I end up with all the books that I have earmarked for destruction or selling or whatever other euphemism I can think of, staying in heaps somewhere in the house.

But to throw away a book!

I seek steely determination. A dark night. A heavy gauge black sack. A near dump.