The bookshelf crisis is getting too acute to be ignored. Things have been getting tight for some time now, with new additions having to be stuffed horizontally into the shelves on top of the existing books, and tottering heaps starting to collect on the study floor. I've suggested to the Systems Administrator a couple of times that it was getting to the point where we needed to start building shelves in the third spare bedroom. Which decodes as the SA needing to build them, or my needing the SA to do so, since you would not rest anything heavier than a magazine on a shelf put up by me.
We already have bookshelves running round three sides of the ironing room, and two sides of one of the spare rooms, as well as two walls of the study. In truth, there isn't much space in the second spare room that isn't taken up by windows, or fitted cupboards, other than the wall that the head of the bed rests against. The SA has always been rather resistant to building shelves across the beds, perhaps fearing a Leonard Bast style fatal incident, and this time did not seem at all keen on putting up any more shelves at all. I began to grasp the awful truth, that we might need to edit the books.
I have already been through one round of editing, by dint of tidying away some bulky series into plastic boxes and shoving them under the ironing room bed. As I explained at the time, I was not insisting of getting rid of the almost complete sets of Dick Francis or Patrick O'Brien, and they would be there all neatly boxed up and ready to slide out from under the bed if wanted, they just didn't need to be on display in the ironing room twenty-four seven, waiting for one of us to pluck a volume from the shelves. The SA did seem slightly offended at first, asking plaintively why none of my books were being banished under the bed, but accepted that it made sense. A few of the massive airport thriller paperbacks, bought in the days of commuting, were even sent to the charity shop, the SA admitting that they weren't so well written anybody would want to read them a second time (and if you did, they were now very cheap on Kindle where you could turn the font size up).
It isn't just unnecessary books taking up space in the ironing room. There are box files, and crates of lever arch files containing my old Writtle notes, and financial records going back to the year dot. Some of those are clearly highly necessary, but others really not. I don't honestly need a file of credit card statements from the nineties, for an account that I closed in 2000. And do I need my Writtle notes and coursework? Principles of mechanisation definitely not, nor the introduction to science module. But garden history? And do the beekeepers need to keep accounts going back years? But do I need to obtain the committee's approval before throwing them out? Does the SA want a box of receipts and paperwork relating to a boat we no longer own?
Throwing out old stuff feels laborious out of all proportion to any objective measure of the labour involved. I shredded my old card statements, aware it was probably an unnecessary precaution, as a 1997 gold card statement wouldn't honestly be of much use to any would-be identity thief. They brought back some memories, though. I used to spend more having my hair cut fifteen years ago than I do now, and I spent much more on clothes. Petrol bought at an Aberystwyth garage must have meant a trip to visit my parents. The name of one shop that appeared several times baffled me utterly, and I still can't think what it sold or where it was, unless it was the shoe shop near the office. Working in an office was quite expensive, what with suits and handbags and court shoes and haircuts, not to mention the season ticket. I felt vaguely plaintive as the evidence of my previous gilded lifestyle went through the shredder, even though I can't have looked at those statements in around thirteen years, since I filed them and put the folder in a box. If I suddenly achieve fame late in life (which is unlikely) my biographer will wish that I'd kept them. Or if I go senile, my carer could have used them to try and trigger memories of my youth.
Old chicken feed paper sacks come in handy when you have a lot of clearing out to do. The shredded statements were followed by some of the less appealing Writtle notes, plus, in a fit of bravado, two cheque books for a bank account that no longer exists, since the beekeepers closed it several years ago and are not even with the same bank any more. I put my old children's books in the boxes so liberated, along with Terry Pratchett and Miss Read (to show that it is not only the SA's books that get put in boxes). Then I obtained the SA's permission to take the large black bin bag full of the SA's old, white, formal, double cuffed Thomas Pink shirts, none of which have ever been worn since the SA retired from office life, to the recycling centre.
After that I had to stop for a rest. I needed the SA's input on which thrillers could go to the PDSA bookstall, or at least under the bed, which is not a question you should bully anyone else into deciding on while they have a cold and a cracked rib. But in any case I was exhausted. I don't even want to think about what it will be like if and when we have to move house.
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