The weather cools further: this time I may have the French door open, but I do not have the small fan on. By such things one measure the descent to the depths of autumn and on to winter! I am also doing up my coat when I go for my second bike ride, rather than leaving it unzipped.
On my bike ride to Gavà on the beach side paseo, I see more evidence of the removal of the last of the temporary chiringuitos, a true commercial indication of the changing of the seasons. But, in spite of all these portents, the weather remains generally fine, and I have not had to take the car to my early morning swim, so far!
Although my timing for my swim is exact, the time that I leave for my bike ride to Gavà differs, depending on whether I have written anything of consequence in my notebook, or if I am engaged in conversation with people in the café, but seemingly at whatever time I leave, there are the Unknown Regulars that I pass or am passed by.
The start of Autumn sees the re-emergence of all the retired folk who have been nudged off their parts of the paseo by the summer visitors and the kids. Now that the kids are (mostly) back in school there is a sort of spaciousness to the beach area which is being reclaimed by those of a certain age. Some of them (us?) are defiant in their appearance and their actions, relentlessly throwing themselves into the cooling waters of the Med or parading along the paseo in temperature-ignoring wispy coverings and pretending that the summer is still with us.
There are plenty of cyclists, many of whom are in Lycra and, at first glance, look to be common or garden wearers of that revealing material, but a more searching look shows that the costumes are holding the riders together rather than making them more aerodynamic! But that is to be commended. Just as TV series are now ‘colour blind’ when it comes to casting, so clothing is ‘body-blind’ – you wear what you want and the fit is what you decide it is, rather than having to make reference to some sort of unobtainable body-ideal that can only be achieved by self-inflicted starvation or torture in the gym!
You can see where this is going. It will end up with my justifying anything in a reductio ad absurdam that (in spite of the poor Latin) will allow me to feel smug!
Enough!
I find that I am oppressed not by the number of books that I have, but rather their weight. I have lived with ‘too many books’ since I was a kid, so that in my smallish bedroom I had to be careful when I awoke as the shelves on my bedside wall, actually stretched over the bed itself, so that I slid out of bed rather than rose from it!
There was never enough space and gradually every room in the house became, as my mother would phrase it, “infested” with books.
The move from Cardiff to Catalonia was beset with problems because of the number of books that had to be housed (or flatted) and not all of my prized possessions made it onto new shelves in my new country, but an inordinate number of IKEA Billy Bookcases later and a substantial number of the books found a space. Not that the space was coherent, as the moves from Cardiff, to storage, to flat, to releasing more storage, to house meant that an overall system was never really imposed on my books and in the various rooms of the house there are now what you could describe as “colonies” of like-minded books forming interesting islands of partial coherence but separate from an over-arching empire of classification.
I must admit that I have got used to the disparate nature of my literary holdings and quite enjoy the serendipitous discovery of a long-lost volume tucked somewhere where it has not logical reason to be. Some of the juxtapositioning of some of my books simply looks far too contrived to be aleatory, but I assure you that however pretentious the shelf might look to the outside eye, it is what it is by luck rather than intention!
The problem that I am presently wrestling with is to do with the placement of new books. In spite of the lack of available space, that has in no way hindered my purchase of new volumes that I “need”. And sometimes “need” is augmented by “bargain” – in the sense of value for money.
I try and tell myself that I have no problem in paying an inordinate amount of money for a decent seat in the Opera, but I would hesitate to pay the same amount of money for a book. Even though books, I have to admit, have given me more (if different) pleasure than Opera. I can pay a triple figure sum for a seat for a momentary experience, but not pay the same amount for something that can give lasting tangible pleasure.
I am not the sort of person to pay vast sums of money for a first edition. The first editions I have were bought because I bought the books when they came out first. I do have a 1702 edition of Swift, but that was an unexpected gift and not something that I bought for myself.
My problem was that Taschen Books had a sale.
Taschen Books is an imprint that produces spectacularly impressive volumes as well as what you might call domestic books, but their key, or one of their USP is in producing books that are large, opulent, and very heavy.
In the on-line sale I bought a number of these books which, when they were delivered, it was impossible to carry them all upstairs at the same time. It is also difficult to hold them and if you rest them on your knees, they crush them. They are ‘table’ books and, when they are opened up, they need a big table to accommodate them.
At the moment they form an arty looking pile by the side of my chair, looking almost like a stage prop of a pile of large books. The trouble is that I have nowhere to put them.
A set of my large art books are in an extra open section that I have attached to the top of a whole series of Billy Bookcases. But these books are too big to fit into those oversized shelves and anyway, the idea of reaching up and bringing one of them down to reader level without doing irreparable harm to yourself, or at least breaking an arm or a hand is not to be considered.
Their weight is too great when they are put on any domestic normal shelf for it to survive. They have to be put at the base of the bookcase, but it means taking out two shelves to fit them in – and I simply do not have the room to rearrange without (perish the thought) actually getting rid of some of my books.
So, they sit there at the moment, like a monument, waiting for life to rearrange itself so that they can be enjoyed.
I have spent my life, giving preference to books, and I am girding my literary loins to Find A Solution.
The books will win. They always win!
