Looking but not seeing

Every year Specsavers takes the time to send me a very nice letter telling me I am due for an eye test, and every year I throw it in the bin, muttering about proactive marketing and the like.

Today, however, I have had a change of heart, and decided that when the next invite comes, I’m taking it up.

It has nothing to do with the fact that today, I was looking out of the dining room window and waving. ‘Who are you waving at?’ my husband asked.

‘Barbara from next door!’ I explained, exasperated by his usual lowly powers of observation.

‘That’s a man with a wheelbarrow and a mustache’ he said.

Maybe I just need to clean the windows.

Weapons of Male Destruction

It is not advisable, when you have young male adults in the household, to run out of tinfoil.

The cardboard tube left behind makes a simple but effective weapon that can strike even a six-foot person clean out of a computer chair and dash him to the floor. The retaliation process is ugly and hard to clean up after. I will need some new plant pots, a Hoover bag and there may be dental work.

When is the Easter break over?

Compulsory reading

I am reading this book, not because I want but to but because if I don’t I can’t go back in my favourite bookshop and buy any more books, and I desperately want a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
But my friend who works in the bookshop had her book group read this and she really thought I would enjoy it, so I can’t go back until I have read it and she wants me to join the book group but I jealously guard my reading time and don’t want to have to read something someone else wants me to read. There is an irony here.

The End

I walked into my fondly-named library tonight and a book had fallen from the topmost shelf. I went over and picked it up, meaning to put it back into the gap it had left above my head, wondering what had made a tightly packed book fall from a shelf not even the cats can reach.

It was Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

The Weight of the World

There are two things that are difficult about Saturday.

Finding a shop that still has a Guardian, and carrying it home.

Today we bought a copy in M&S (very inconsistent with newspapers) and the till lady put it AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BAG UNDER SIX PINTS OF MILK AND A BAG OF TEACAKES.

All the way home I felt distressed and violated. I can’t bear my newspaper to be anything but flat, clean, unopened and absoutely UNCRINKLED. My impeccable husband offered to iron it for me, and even get the fingerprints off, but the damage was done.

And it weighed TWO AND THREE QUARTER POUNDS.  Must have been all that T.S.Eliot.

“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! “

Leroy does enjoy a lot of attention.

Books by the yard

I bought all these books this week – but I’m actually reading this:

And it’s brilliant – there isn’t enough Yiddish in literature these days, and I’m really enjoying it. I had been working my way through Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy but I found it pretentious and irritating. Maybe it was past its meta-sell-by date.

Do you do Dewey?

In the summer my cutting edge husband built me a library. Not known for his DIY skills (well not in a good way) he converted a room in our house into a beautiful book-lined sanctuary so that I could escape from the demands of modern-day mothering and general soul-bothering crappery.

But it is giving me problems! How do you classify your books? Getting them all in there from all over three floors of house was a breeze compared to getting them onto the shelves in some sort of order that satisfies my obsessional need to do it right. I can divide fiction and non-fiction, but do you have a separate travel shelf? Do you put all the hardbacks together for aesthetic pleasure, or file them according to their individual taxonomic requirements? Can Stephen King and John Updike sit together just because they are hard? Or do you chuck Stephen all together because he might bring down the tone? And don’t get me started on the paperbacks! Alphabetised by author, or title? And is there a valid place for a plant or should it only be books? What about putting all the Penguins together? They look nice but it messes with all the other categories and anyway there’s too much Iris Murdoch. Do I allow the children’s Harry Potter on there or just burn it? I’ve had my giant magnifying glass over the Guardian book section, looking at those ‘author’s room’ photos, to see how the masters do it, but most of them would rather show you their obscure priceless daguerrotypes given them by equally obscure writers. I think I’ll email Scott Pack and ask him. He’s got a lot of books.

Tickle me – you know you want to…

He’s only lying there because there’s no room on the cooker

Flat-pack cat

Don’t turn off that heat – I’m not done yet!