My wife and I have embarked upon and are now fatally committed to a difficult, sometimes heart-rending task: we are culling our books.
There are thousands of them, distributed on shelves throughout the house and stacked in the shed in boxes some of which were closed, sealed and labelled 25 years ago. Many of those boxes have been as nomadic as we were — London, Lara, Little River, Anakie, Emu Flat via Clare — and, like us I guess, are a bit battered, threatening to come apart at some seams and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, older.
The less travelled boxes have simply sat in this or that shed, submitting mutely to move after move, waiting their hour. And that hour has come. Amid volcanic explosions of dust and the accusatory, rending sound of long-sealed tape being ripped from ancient cardboard, the literary treasures are revealed — except that 'treasures' is pushing the definition a bit.
What on earth possessed us, you wonder, either to buy, accept or keep Methods of Book Design? It emerges from its long exile into a world when the book and its design are bloody nearly dead. Or The British Way of Life, just on 60 years old and chronicling an England long gone and spectacularly further dismantled only weeks ago.
Or Architecture for Beginners? We were never architectural beginners, our structural monuments in various places being confined to a few chook houses and the odd, slightly off-square garden shed. Then there's Coming of Age in Samoa (or, as S. J. Perelman memorably added, 'Growing up in New Guinea or whatever the hell I was doing when I was 18').
A Writer's Notes on his Trade and A Bibliography of Anglo-Irish Literature fall uselessly from the same chaotically spilling box adding more intrigue to the mysterious book buying past.
Confronting the shelves inside the house is no easier. There are many books here that one or other of us — but rarely both — want to keep, yet decisions must be made and the cull must be ruthless. Speaking for myself, I know who to blame, who set me on this path that would land me in front of heavily populated shelves of books, torn wretchedly between this one and that one. It was Mrs Murphy.
As a small boy, I lived in Havelock Street, St Kilda: down one end of our street, you came