In the run up to our house move I began visiting the new house. Partly I did this in order to wonder around the place, and imagine what it would be like to live there, and partly I did it so that I could move books.
“Why do we have so many books?” I asked my wife.
“We?” She said. “I don’t think any of these…” she gestured to a phalanx of boxes, “have many of my books in them.”
“If you have more than 1000 books,” my friend Steph told me on a zoom call, “you technically have a library.”
“So it turns out,” I told my wife, “that we actually have a library.”
“We?” she said.
The gravest mistake I’ve made over the last several years is allowing boxes of books to be stored in our loft - in doing so I went directly against the advice of my mother, a veteran of several moves, including a few international ones.
“Don’t, whatever you do, let your loft get full of boxes,” she would say and I would nod sagely. Then I would put another box in the loft because I needed book shelf space.
By the time moving day actually rolled around I had already moved several boxes of books - and was regretting my life choices at leisure. Boxes of books are disappointingly heavy.
On the last visit to the new house before the move I found a package had arrived, addressed to ‘Dr Revd Simon Cross’.
It was from a second-hand book retailer.
“It’s a book! Who on earth is sending me more books?” I demanded. “Why are they doing this to me? And why are they calling me doctor reverend?”
I began to scroll through my memory for clues - who among my friends, my so called friends, might have done this vicious and vindictive thing? I found that I could think of no one - mainly because hardly any of them knew the new address. I looked at the book for clues.
The cover told me it was ‘The wretched of the earth’, by Franz Fanon. Inside the book had been heavily annotated by a person unknown. I glared at it with suspicion, and read the first page. A short while later I looked up again, having read a few more pages.
“It’s good this book,” I said, “what else did this guy write?”
‘This is how they get you,’ I realised.
In the days following the move proper I began to get some of the books organised, specifically the books that pertain, more or less, to my work. I counted them - and found that in themselves they do not, quite, comprise a library.
Because some of them used to live in the loft, only coming downstairs for high days and holidays, I had accidentally gathered some duplicates. I began to thin them out, getting rid, too, of books that spoke of previous eras of my life. Slowly the collection began to feel more manageable, ordered, and sane.
‘This is also how they get you,’ I realised.
In the days immediately prior to the house move the eldest had been in Edinburgh, where she had produced a comedy show which had something to do with pirates. I decided to stop taking too close an interest in her productions after going to see a student show in which she played a snail. It was very funny, but I was also the oldest person in the room.
“So there’s a Mario Kart tournament among the Fringe performers,” she said. “And it turns out that I am, officially, the slowest Mario Kart racer in the entire Edinburgh Fringe.”
“Something to be proud of,” I said.
“By thirty seconds,” she said.
“Well done,” I said.
“How’s the house looking?” She asked.
“It’s doing ok, I’ve moved a lot of books over there, basically every time I go over I take books with me. I’m so fed up of books, I have too many.”
“Speaking of books,” she said, “did any packages arrive there?”
“Packages?” I said.
“Addressed to doctor revered Simon Cross?”
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.