Desperation

... on several levels. The first level is, of course the weather - 11ºC all day; rain all day; grey all day. It's July, for heaven's sake, and it feels like November and all that took me out of the house was a necessary trip to the supermarket. I don't do well when I don't go for a walk. I did the ironing instead.

...Which leads me to another level of despair. These are my bookshelves, or at least a good proportion of them. They're in my spare bedroom, and are constructed on one of the few walls that is not a gable end - in other words, dry. I ordered them to fit the books I had at the time - but books have become larger, even paperbacks. Hence the random piles of books lying flat where they should be in neatly serried ranks. When the shelves were first put up I revelled in the additional space they gave me, made the mistake of arranging my authors alphabetically. But then I acquired more books ... 

Some of them are now, like their owner, not in their first youth. Some come from my own childhood, like the complete collection of Arthur Ransome, or the paperbacks I can still remember devouring avidly about the age of twelve. Towards the upper left is a leather-bound set of Kipling, inherited from my grandfather. Some of them now have brown pages, yellow curling edges. And many of them have that indefinable musty smell that you get in second-hand bookshops. It's all right when you can have a window open, but when it's as cold and miserable as today the window remains shut. This is my spare room, remember - the room where visitors have to sleep.

So, despair all round. Bad weather, ironing, books that defy any effort to tame them. Things can only improve ... no?