No Comfort Here: Culling the Library - Part II

I’ve always thought it strange that someone whose surname was Comfort would put his name to pictures that look less comfortable and comforting than riding naked on a hedgehog.

   

Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex just popped up on my Twitter feed, as it’s World Book Day. The Tweeter said that The Joy of Sex was the book we all secretly read in our parents’ house. That made me feel very old, as I have The Joy of Sex (A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking), More Joy of Sex (A Lovemaker’s Companion) and The New Joy of Sex (Newly Illustrated and Fully Revised Edition), all of which were bought with my pocket money and not pilfered from my parents.

   

I was not sexually active when the book was first published in 1972 (heck, I was 14 and still playing secret agents with corned beef tin keys in my local castle), but was, like any teenager, curious. Resuming the great library cull in my house, I’d put all three in the slush pile, but have just rescued them to remind myself of what “joys” I must have felt upon first opening its pages.

   

The first volume sprang open at ‘Semen’ and explained: “There is no lovemaking without spilling this, on occasions at least.” I can only imagine with what horror my OCD first met this information. The fact that the book opened at this page makes me think it must have been the most worrying part of the whole sexual operation. ‘Mons Pubis’ must have been a walk in the park after this.

   

However, Mr Comfort has some comforting advice: when the stain has dried – and, get this - it’s removable from “clothing or furnishings” with “a stiff brush”. Trust me, oh blessed Comforter, it ain’t as easy as it sounds. I recall a politician I was involved with in the late Eighties, and he ruined my red sectional sofa. Mr C’s cleaning tip is a lie. Keep men away from furnishings, I say; or don’t buy foam-filled sofas.

   

By the way, should you find semen spilling onto your partner, he says you can “massage it gently in”. Apparently, “the pollen-odor of fresh semen is itself an aphrodisiac”. Forget 1972; that’s news to me in 2016, I can tell you.

   

The first volume illustrations feature a man who was way too much like the Jesus in my Children’s Bible (I’ll be moving on to the culling of my religious section next). I just couldn’t get to grips mentally or emotionally with a man who was one day raising people from the dead and turning water into wine, and the next engaged in ‘Feuille de Rose’. This was Jesus we were talking about; I just couldn’t see him using that stiff brush to dispense with any ungainly bodily fluids stuck to his robe.

   

The problem with all three volumes is that they make sex sound so . . . well, nice. Of course, it can be, but where are the sections titled ‘What to do when he’s shagging your best friend’, or ‘What to do when he’s so tiny, you need sat nav to find it’?

   

I binned my whole sex section (two shelves) along with George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, figuring that I no longer have a need for any of them. It’s not that I know everything there is to know about politics, fishing/shooting yourself, or sex, but if there’s any of the latter to be had, I’d rather be out there doing it than reading about it. And if I haven’t learned enough from the many books on my shelves by now, then I deserve to be punished and not get any.

   

They are all yellow and falling apart at the seams now (the books, not just the men I know): Love and Orgasm, The Hite Report, Men and Sex, Transcendental Sex (who could be arsed with that, quite frankly – apart from Sting), and, my favourite, Nice Girls Do. I’m pretty sure I liked that title because my Baptist background assured me that nice girls really don’t until they get married. 

I must have been thrilled to read the section headed ‘Janet takes a chance’. Janet was 31 and owned a candy store and, when her husband was playing with her thighs one night, she remembered her childhood pediatrician, Dr Rosenbloom. She loved him because he was “so gentle and he gave me suckers every time I went in for an examination.” 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Janet starts talking about the joys of the good doctor when she’s having sex, and this sets off “an explosion of orgasms”. And it gets better: “Not only didn’t my husband criticize me, he got the hardest erection I’ve ever felt . . . This talking stuff really works!” Good old Dr Rosenbloom and his suckers. 

Anyone else a tad worried about all this?

   

I wonder what I also learned from The Opposite Sex (Telling the Teenagers), first published in 1957, a year before I was born. The focus is on home making, and there’s a whole section on furniture, which “must be easy to take care of and clean”. 

You’re telling me. Especially if the likes of Mr Comfort and his mates are popping by of an evening.

   

Do we ever learn anything about sex from books, or is it an ever elusive thing that, once you think you’ve nailed it, surprises you in whole new ways? It has to, because people are different, and what works with one might not work with another. Not being a fan of masked balls, for example, Mr Comfort’s picture of a man and woman facing each other wearing eye-masks would have me running screaming from the bedroom (or the sofa).

   

So, having briefly returned to the sex section of my bookcase, I’ve decided that the whole thing needs to be culled. It’s as much as I can do to remember a guy’s name these days, let alone what I have to do to keep him entertained. My demands will never again be as high as anything in these tomes. Forty-four years on from The Joy of Sex, if a man has a penis, that’s fine by me.

   

Happy World Book Day!

  

   

Nigella, Me and Ramekingate

Ramekin dishes. 

Six red, eight white. How often have I used them in the 30+ years since I bought them?

   

Twice. Actually, I think two of the white ones have never been used. I’m not even sure what ramekins are for, but when my mother told me of a recipe that was so goddamn easy and, moreover, a veritable meal in a tiny pot, I was on that Ramekins4U hit list.

   

So, here’s another dilemma: do I keep the six red and dispense with the eight white? How can I possibly assess how many ramekin loving friends are yet to enter my life? Will these as yet imaginary people prefer white or red? You see? This moving lark isn’t as easy as it seems. The ramekins are top shelf, kitchen cupboard one. I’m already a wreck. Heaven help me when I get to the Pyrex section.

   

I recall supplementing the red ramekins with white ones I bought from the Lakeland Plastics birthpool that became my life when the store opened in the Hayes in Cardiff. The first time I used them was when they transferred to a dinner party that involved Nigella Lawson –  I’ll return to that. But the tiny pots got me thinking: whatever happened to Lakeland Plastics? Were they still in the Hayes? Did they still fill their glorious shelves with things I never knew I wanted until I saw them and then never used because I didn’t know I didn’t want them until I’d bought them?

   

Upon writing that, I just looked them up and discovered that they are, indeed, still in Cardiff (Oh no: “Taxi, please!”). However, they changed their name from Lakeland Plastics to, simply, Lakeland, in 1997, and I’ve just been online to find out where they are on the ramekin issue.

   

Dear lord! There is now an “Elegance Large Ramekin”, which seems to me to defeat the object. Isn’t an ELR essentially a pudding bowl? Maybe it’s not as big as it sounds, as it’s only £1.59 (I’m pretty sure I paid, like, £159 when they were de rigeur back in the Nineties). But now there’s a “Dura 230 ramekin”, which is £5.97. Why am I even looking – and, more disturbingly, considering them, when I am sitting looking at 14 ramekins that don’t even match and haven’t seen a blowtorch in . . . Well, ever.

   

Now, you see, just because I’ve Googled ramekins and blow torch, my computer has decided that I need the Kitchen Craft Deluxe Cooks Blowtorch and Ramekin Gift Set at £15.71. No! Please leave me alone: I’m ramekinned out! They are so going into the Kitchen Cull box.

   

But I will explain the last time they were used. I was in my early thirties in London and I was friendly with people who many might consider the “in” set. But that’s always an illusion: everyone on any In set always has the feeling of being an outsider – that is what, ironically, makes them the In set: the outsiders who have found common ground.

   

I knew Nigella’s first husband, the journalist John Diamond, who was not only a great writer, but adorable company – sharp, funny, a late night hanger-outer at the Groucho Club, as I was. I met Nigella through him and we too became friends, so much so that I decided to throw a dinner party for them and several other In people.

   

It was a disaster. I spent just 20 minutes in the dining room as I was in the kitchen the entire night. My speciality was the starter – some smoked salmon and cream thing baked in the oven – in a ramekin.

   

John had forgotten to tell me he was allergic to fish and I remember rushing down to the local shop mid-dinner party for extra supplies that he might like.

   

Victoria Hislop, hugely successful author and, seriously, the best chef/cook/host on the planet, told me when she received my next invitation that they had come to see me, not sit at the dining table while I entertained myself in the kitchen. The ramekins never saw the light of day again.

   

As for Nigella, we are still in touch, and she uses ramekin dishes to make gooey puddings that I would never like anyway, as I don’t have a sweet tooth. I know her to be a brilliant, beautiful woman who has come through so much personally to forge an extraordinary career; but I was never crazy about her food.

   

I feel so bad saying that - I'm sure it's me, not her. But I used to go round for a meal when John was working and have to go to the local Indian to pick up a takeaway when she served up the likes of broccoli in oil. John hated the smell of Indian food and, upon his return, would throw my leftovers in the bin. I still buy Nigella's books and watch her TV shows, though. With a takeaway in my lap.

   

Funny what comes back to you in life in the culinary eye-bath of a ramekin dish.

  

   

So Long, Farewell

I thought I’d be crying. 

This time last week, I was on a bus in New York heading to JFK airport to catch a flight back to the UK, where I was selling my house of the past nine years. I was fine until I arrived in the UK and caught the train home.

   

Home. Soon, it wouldn’t be that at all - not for me, anyway. Other people, new paint, different pitched voices would soon inhabit it: a space transformed in one swift movement handing over a set of keys. So long, Farewell, as the Von Trapp children in The Sound of Music sang.

   

I started crying at Newport. Twelve minutes before the train was due at Cardiff Central, I phoned my friend Mary and sobbed. I was dreading arriving at my house in Llandaff and seeing the SOLD notice outside it for the first time. And I was dreading putting the key in the lock and seeing over five decades of life getting ready to say goodbye.

   

So much stuff. Where to begin? Top to bottom? Kitchen to attic? Hide under a pillow in my bedroom on the middle floor and just hope that it would all go away without my having to lift a finger?

   

I’m now on my fifth day back and it hasn’t been anywhere near as painful as I had imagined. The first strangers through the door on Sunday morning bought some garden furniture, clothes and a vase; the afternoon, a couple of light fittings went; yesterday, four pieces of furniture.

   

I’ll be honest – and I really mean this: I’m loving it. There is no feeling of loss, just one of incredible gratefulness that I have been able to live a life that is filled with so much happiness – people, travel, experiences that so many could only dream of. Yes, much of it has come at a price, and a heavy financial one that I have documented elsewhere; but far from a feeling of emptiness, I feel, for the first time in years, a sense of overwhelming richness. I have always said how blessed I am in my family and friends and, almost everything I pick up carries a memory that has had me laughing so much. There is sadness among the possessions, too, but that is just the nature of the lives we all lead.

Mainly, it's a garnering the evidence of a live well lived.

   

Today, I found an invitation to my 40^th birthday (17 years ago, ye gods), hand-written by my mother, to Auntie Muriel and Uncle Les, who were our next door neighbours when we moved from Cardiff to Newport in 1962 when I was four. My first party had been in London for my close friends, and Mum organised this one in Bristol, where she lived, for people who had been a big part of my life when I was growing up.

   

I remained close to Auntie Mew (as I called her) and Uncle Les until they both died. Living in 2 Farmwood Close, I was friends with her youngest son, Tim, who was older and very adventurous. He had a guitar he made out of one long piece of wood attached to a square piece. He attached nails to the wood, hooked them up with elastic bands, and sang Beatles songs. When he made me own guitar, we formed a band. Well, a duo. We were great.

   

I was always keen on music, as poor Auntie Mew found one Saturday afternoon when Mum went to town with Dad and left me (eight) and my brother, three years younger, in the house (in the days when children could be left with a neighbour listening through the wall). I raided my parents’ record collection and decided that I would learn the songs in The Sound of Music, which I had seen with Mum, Dad and Nigel three years before, during the traumatic holiday when Nigel had managed to get hold of a bottle of Junior Aspirin (that story’s longer than the movie). 

   

By the time Mum and Dad returned from town, Auntie Mew wasn’t just listening through the walls, she was climbing them. I had played the soundtrack eight times and, worse, been singing along. In subsequent years, we laughed about it every time I saw her.

   

I remember so much from that house: Diane, whose birthday (October 31^st – I have a phenomenal memory) I loved because her mother put tiny silver baubles on her cake; the smell of creosote on the fence Dad built at the side of the house; the rose bush planted in memory of his father that moved with us to Bridgend when I was 11; being carried home from school with glandular fever and Mum answering the door, hysterical.

   

I’ve been crying today, but not in a sad way. 

Auntie Mew replied to the birthday invitation in a poem, and these lines particularly struck me: “I watched this little being/So serious in her play/And smile when I remember/She carried her treasures around on a tray.”

   

I smile so much at that because, in addition to The Sound of Music horror, she always reminded me how I used to carry my things around with me. 

Was that the need for security? The tray that served as my comfort blanket? Was it fear of loss, known but not articulated at such a young age? 

Am I now, at 57, still clinging to my  treasures on my tray? Or, am I finally learning to let go?

   

So long. Farewell.

   

The Apple Cemetery

I’ve had to take a break from book culling. 

Having spent yesterday being ruthless in my decisions to keep some books and not others, I started unculling them today. 

What if I woke up one morning desperate for Seamus Heaney and I’d already chucked him? Hmmm. But then I met him once in a Soho pub and he wasn’t very pleasant (he actually slapped my face – not hard, but it was a shock), so he can stay culled. And, having decided to dispense with all poetry (apart from my mate Tony Curtis) on the grounds that I can Google it anytime, suddenly I find myself slowly adding poets back to the “Keep” pile. 

Even though I’m the only person in the house, I’m doing it very furtively, like an alcoholic smuggling a bottle of gin under the sofa in the hope that nobody will notice. I’ve had to uncull Tony Harrison, because I met him once, too, and he was lovely . . . oh, dear – after all that, I’ve just unculled Heaney, on the grounds that the books might be worth something. So I have to stop before I decide that I can’t live without Proust.

   

I’ve now moved on to the Apple Cemetery that is my attic. Almost every Apple computer since the company started is there. Black, turquoise, purple; desktops the size of houses, laptops like handbags, laptops heavier than suitcases – Steve Jobs must be smiling in his grave.

   

It’s made me think how much technology has changed my life. When I began my career as TV Critic on the London Evening Standard in the late Eighties, I had to watch TV live, write my copy longhand and then phone it in to a copytaker at the paper at 7am. Today, I spend most of my time in the States, where I am able to watch TV on anything with a screen just like anyone in the UK, and I’m able to e-mail it straight to the editor.

   

I remember the first time somebody asked me “What’s your e-mail address?” and I berated them for being ridiculous, insisting that such a silly idea would never catch on. Today, when I get on  a plane, at 30,000 feet, I am the voice screaming “Whadderyermean, yer don’t have WiFi?”

   

The uphill task that awaits me in the Apple cemetery is taking the information off the hard drive before I sell the computers. Some of the hard drives are broken (you know who you are, Big Purple Mac), but others store some of my earliest writing. Maybe it’s time to let go of that (like so much else), too.

   

It’s not only the computers in the cemetery. Every piece of software known to Apple mankind seems to there, too. And then are the Dummies guides to those software programmes. Did I ever open one of them? Of course not. Mac OS X Leopard was dead almost as soon as it could run.

   

My electronic life has shrunk in the technical wash. These days, I download more books than I buy, and when I’m travelling (which is a lot), I watch TV and movies on my iPad. Paramedics have to be called when I go into panic mode if I can’t find my iPhone (it’s invariably right next to me, as the bartenders keep pointing out. Thank you, Justin Sigda at Mr Biggs in New York, for being my full-time Apple minder).

   

Bizarrely, while the products have shrunk, the packaging has grown. I could build a church alongside the cemetery with the empty boxes for iPhones, iPads and laptops that still lurk like Mrs Rochester in my attic, ever a fire risk even though their presence has been forgotten long ago. Why did I hold on to them all?

   

Easy. Because they, like Apple products themselves, are works of art: the stiffness of the cardboard, the exquisite print, the slightly bitten Apple logo – every box a tiny eco coffin, a new sculpture to keep safe the perfection within. Alas, my bank manager doesn’t quite see it that way.

   

I’ve been putting the boxes into green recycling bags, from where they look back at me through the transparency with a silent cry of “Why? Why me?” begging for release. When I sealed their fate with a double knot and took them outside ready for refuse collection, it was like saying goodbye to my family, emigrating to the other side of the world.

   

If I’m like that with the boxes, what am I going to be like when it comes to the computers? Maybe I could re-cull Heaney and keep just one small iPhone box? Would that be so very indulgent?

   

No, no, they have to go. But I can’t pretend that this is easy. Everything I touch is a slice of life, good or bad, and already I’m emotionally exhausted. Still, at least I have a computer on which I can play in order to avoid the real business of packing. 

By the day of completion, I suspect I will have a book. Which I can then download to my new iPhone. Oh, come on. You didn’t really think I wouldn’t start making plans for another cemetery, did you? 

Steve Jobs may be dead, but my Apple body count lives on.

   

Pining for Love

Men and pine furniture: the two things responsible for my habitual moving. 

It was the purchase of this small forest that set the ball rolling, and I was doomed never to recover. If I hadn’t bought that damned pine furniture, I wouldn’t have had the quandary of where to put it when I broke up with Carl, wouldn’t have moved it to Soho and had my heart broken by Phil, wouldn’t have moved it to Cardiff and started up with Steve, and wouldn’t still be stuck with it by myself in Cardiff over 25 years on at the age of 57, hoping that pine, like avocado-coloured bathroom suites, might make a comeback.

   

I was living in Belsize Park, in my first mortgaged home, and Carl was a fellow critic on a national newspaper and had been living with his girlfriend of seven years, Jane, who was trying to get pregnant. Carl didn’t like the fact that she was so fat and said that he would like to have a child with me. We were talking about a seriously unavailable man here.

   

I was still hung up on Alan, a manic-depressive who went into hibernation for six months at a time. I knew it was over when, adopting the Florence Nightingale approach during one of these dark periods, I sent him, by taxi, a spinach, rice and cheese bake (Delia Smith recipe) I had baked for him, a bottle of Burgundy, a cone of Swiss chocolates I had bought for him during the Montreux Comedy Festival and, for reasons I have yet to understand, a 12 foot inflatable skeleton. I paid the driver an extra £20 for his trouble, although he had to leave everything on the doorstep (including the fully inflated skeleton) because, he informed me by phone later, there was no reply at the door. The day after, I received a message on my answer machine, in painfully flat tones: “Hello, this is Alan. Thank you for my present. Goodbye.” 

This really isn’t going anywhere, I thought.

   

I thought I was in love with Carl and the intensity was extraordinary: endless phone-calls, incessant declarations of love, the strange comfort of late afternoon fog, hand in hand, walking his dog on Primrose Hill; fingers clasped across dining tables, resentful of the cutlery that separated them even for an instant. And I remember the seeming timelessness of passion.

    

There were only two down sides for me (apart from the obvious one of him living with someone else). One was the hideous green and yellow jug in the shape of a duck that Carl gave me for my 30^th birthday. A china duck is not romantic. 

   

The other was that I had to keep hearing different versions of his columns. I would receive a phone-call in which he gave me version one, then he would arrive at my apartment with version two, then I would get a phone-call with version three before he filed it to his newspaper. He once dragged me out of bed when I was sick with tonsillitis to have me sit on his lap while he read me his column straight off the computer. On the one occasion I went to his house, I had to hear not only his columns, but every piece of music he had ever written; I was even required to admire the enormous Heal’s table on which said his music was composed. Then he started to bring me tapes of said music, too.

   

He also became ill, still claiming that he wanted to leave Jane, but never knowing the right time to tell her. We met almost every day, in restaurants and bars all over London. Carl acquired a facial rash as a result of the stress and, sympathetic as I was, dermatology wasn’t an aphrodisiac as far as I was concerned, and neither were the flakes of skin he used to leave on my pillow. So after just five months, we decided that we wanted to put an end to the trauma and be together. Before he told Jane, we went apartment hunting, Carl expressing a need to have his own study and also a garden for his dog. 

Quite why I put down the entire deposit myself and also one month’s advance rental on the place we chose, is anybody’s guess. Carl also said he liked pine furniture, and off I went to buy up half of Camden Pine (again, without him contributing a penny towards the woodpile money). Having rented out my own apartment and moved into the three-bedroom maisonette we found in Hampstead’s Steele’s Road, I waited for Carl to inform Jane that he was leaving her. I predicted that she would ask him to stay for three months to try to work things out.

   

She did. Bells started to ring when he told me that he still intended to leave, but he thought it decent to hang on to give her time to lose enough weight so that she would be attractive enough to meet someone else. This was the Notre Dame of bell-rings.

    

It ended for good on 3^rd March 1989. Carl told me that there was a lot more low-fat yoghurt in the fridge and that he had started to feel closer to Jane again. I was upset but relieved. I didn’t want to hang around for three months in some kind of diet reality show. I put down the phone in the middle of the conversation after telling him so.

   

I could no longer afford the new rent and so when the tenant in my own apartment did a runner, I returned there. One problem: there just wasn’t room for the pine. So, having always harboured a desire to live in Soho, I rented an apartment in Brewer Street: not for me to live in full-time (Belsize Park was still my main residence) but to house the pine furniture. Having bought it for such a ridiculous price and also feeling it held a certain sentimental value, I could not bear to part with it. Renting a second little home for us both seemed, strangely, like the more cost-effective option. 

It would prove to be just one of many bizarre twists of logic I would apply throughout my life in relation to moving.

   

As it happened, the pine - or, rather, the location of the pine - proved to be a sexual magnet for my next conquest, Phil, a TV presenter. And so began another romance in the brown shadows which, by now, had cost me around ten grand. 

As I look around the Cardiff house I am selling, I know that it’s finally time to chop down the pine forest, along with the the grain of every man in it, and send it to the great wood chipper in the sky.

Culling the Library - Part I

What stays? What goes? How do you decide? 

Do you go with sentimental value, or the ones you are most likely to open again?

   

The first day of what might well be the last major move of my entire life began today with my book collection. My second floor large office, which has three sides of floor to ceiling bookshelves, in addition to two attic storage rooms, six bookcases apiece, plus three bookcases downstairs, was daunting. So many pages, some going back to the first days I could read, some I bought just last week: emotional bookends of a life that has reached 57 years old.

   

And, in the filing cabinet, my diaries: the rather disturbing evidence of 40 years plus, showing that despite all these words, all these pages I have consumed, I have learned next to nothing. I still choose the wrong men and cry over the ones I can’t have. I continue to worry unnecessarily about the small stuff and the potentially big stuff – my health. I have the same anxiety over money and am far too trusting of too many people. 

As I stood before these towers of life experience and advice, what, I wondered, was the point of it all if I am still essentially the same creature I was the moment the first hard covers were placed between my tiny hands? Blimey – and I hadn’t even started on the ‘A’ section yet.

   

The cull foreplay was anxiety inducing. I knew there was no point in keeping my ‘A’ Level and university textbooks, but as I looked along the shelves they still had meaning, if no longer any value in terms of passing exams. Blake – gosh, I hated Blake, but Gwyn Ingli James, who lectured on the poet at Cardiff University, was an inspired and inspiring teacher. I could have married Blake when I left Professor James’s lectures, but then I had to read the stuff. Instant divorce.

   
Would it be sacrilege to dispense with the Shakespeare textbooks? Terry Hawkes, another inspiring lecturer at university, was apparently brilliant, but someone who was to be feared because he was a “Structuralist”  (Yegods! A word uttered in hushed, sinister tones, to newcomers in 1977 – a bit like people declaring themselves members of UKIP today). 

Norman Schwenk, John Peck, Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, John Freeman – all of these lecturers were linked to the books and, 38 years after I went to university, they were still so strong in my memory. To throw away the books would be like throwing away that part of my life – and their contribution - wouldn’t it?

   
But I had to make a start somewhere and so, I’m going to work through the cull alphabetically over the next few days and blogs (feel free to miss letters), beginning, obviously, with ‘A’ which, on my top shelf, had Welsh writer Dannie Abse in pride of place.

   

Oh, God. Well, obviously I can’t throw away all my Dannie Abse because he’s a countryman. Not only was he one of the greatest Welsh writers of all time, he was a lovely man. I once had dinner with him in the Groucho Club in London, and the hot soup caused a blister at the back of my throat. I went into panic mode, convinced I was going to choke to death, but Dannie, being a doctor as well as a writer, calmly told me to breathe and not panic. When my blister subsided, I remember flirting with him outrageously. I think that was the moment he went into panic mode.

   

I recalled another moment when, at the 2008 Welsh Book of the Year awards, Dannie was shortlisted for his memoir, The Presence, about his wife of 54 years, Joan, who died in a crash in the car in which Dannie was driving (Dannie told a friend he wished he had died). At the awards ceremony, Heritage Minister Rhodri Glyn Thomas misread the card and announced runner-up Tom Bullough as the winner. 

It was a dreadfully embarrassing moment, and Bullough, on his way to the stage when the mistake was rectified over the microphone, left. I always thought it a credit to Dannie that he said he wished they had just left it as it was.

   

So no: all the Abse had to stay.

Next on the shelf was Kathy Acker (whatever happened to her, I wondered - then remembered that she died);  Dave Allen (easy cull: never found him funny); Woody Allen (we know what happened to him); and a whole pile of Amises, senior and junior, all of whom I was happy to leave where they were. Not because I didn’t enjoy them at the time, but because I knew I’d never touch them again. I did, however, keep Erix Lax’s biography of Woody Allen, which I have never read, 25 years after buying it. 

Still, there’s a bookmark at page 60, so I know I made the effort. What distracted me, I wonder?

   

You see, that’s another thing I discovered: so many bookmarks in tomes I began and then left. Why? What story took me away from the printed one? Real life? Page 60, by the way, bangs on about Woody’s clarinet playing and when he went to New Orleanszzzzzzzzzzz. Yep. I get it now.

   

After dispensing with the Amises, I discovered that I had wrongly catalogued A Alvarez’s Night, placing it after Martin Amis’s Money. Al (his first name – I love that) is now 86 and I first came across him after reading The Savage God, his book about suicide, which I enjoyed (I use the word loosely) when I was going through my Sylvia Plath phase at university. 

Now, here’s a weird thing: The Savage God has totally disappeared from my collection. It should be in the section that also houses (amongst others) Suicides (Jean Baechler) and Depression (Dorothy Rowe). It remains to be seen if they make the next phase of my life as they are on the non-fiction shelves after Zola.

   

A J Ayer has mysteriously disappeared, too, though I remember he was once married to Nigella Lawson’s mother. I have yet to decide on the Domestic Goddess (she’s in the lower floor section).

   

Tomorrow, it’s your turn Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Alan Bennett and William Boyd. Be afraid. Be very afraid. 

On the plus side, you’re competing with Samuel Beckett – and Blake.