Hiding yet more purchases from partners
I need books. I feel as though I have no choice in the matter. I need shelves and stacks of them in every room in the house. Some, inevitably, will become what are termed in Japanese tsundoku – books bought and never read, sentenced to live forever on shelf or pile – but addiction is seldom logical.
I need to take books on holiday with me. I need to take a book on any journey I am making, whether the bus into town or a train across the country. I need to have a book or two on the go, and I need to know what I will be reading next. I need unread books on the bedside cabinet, and cherished books gone by within easy reach for checking a detail or holding fondly like an old pet brought back to life. Narcotics have nothing on this addiction. It started in a mobile library and becomes more extreme each year.
Books are my crutch. They sustain me, make me giddily happy and profoundly sad. I am never far from my next purchase, whether late at night when booze has persuaded me I must Proceed to Checkout, or in a charity shop buying a title I didn’t need upon publication ten years ago, but suddenly now do. ‘Is that another book?’ I am asked, as I sneak upstairs, like a teenager home considerably beyond midnight or a tip-toeing cartoon burglar. As with all addicts, I have my excuses: ‘It was only a fiver’; ‘I haven’t got this one of his’; ‘I loved this when I was a kid’; and ‘I had this but lent it to John and he never gave me it back’.
It is not my fault. All I am doing is giving a few hundred friends a place to stay.