I should have acknowledged that the ME has been using me extra enthusiastically as a punching bag recently & rewritten the following some time when the bits of my brain were stuck together better but it’s already another fracking week since I last posted t

So last Tuesday there was a knock on the door at eleven in the morning.  I was awake & moving by then,* indeed I had been awake & moving for some time but as I have muttered here before, & will undoubtedly mutter in similar fashion again, the fruitful-association genes for responding to the wholly incomprehensible monolith of other human beings & that great gnashing bully time, are missing from my DNA.  My feeling about that knock on the door was that it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning, & the world is pestering me??   However I was UPRIGHT.**  This counts.  & there, upon my opening the top half of my stable door & leaning heavily on the bottom half, toward maintaining the upright, what to my wondering, & nearly focussed, eyes should appear, but my carpenter. 

CARPENTER!!!!!!!  BOOKSHELF MAN!!!!!!

Not that he’d warned me by text, email, phonecall, smoke signals from the next hill***, or any other practical exhibition of the complex & ever-evolving panoply of creative human communications, that he was planning to come today, or yesterday, or next month, or 2027.  We’d had an initial discussion in November, I think, & a down payment had been committed to his bank account for the purchase of sturdy timber.  & then silence.  Quite a bit of silence.  I was reasonably sure he’d reappear some time.  Some time.  Um.  

BUT . . . CARPENTER.  You are always welcoming to a carpenter if you should be so fortunate as to have one standing at your front door.  You shade your dazzled eyes from his brilliance, you kowtow, you break out the champagne.

Because BOOKSHELVES.  YAAAAAAAAAAAY.  MORE BOOKSHELVES. 

Although I’m going to run out of wall space here sooner rather than later.†  Duh.  Don’t damage yourselves laughing here, you blog-familiar readers.  Walls for bookshelves in this†† house is a fractious point anyway, both because I have three walls with active fireplaces or woodstoves††† under them &, even more captious, I like all the fancy wallpaper I had put up.‡ But in the overwhelming inaugural rush of joy & passion of MORE BOOKSHELVES‡‡, I refuse to spoil it by future fret.  However soon that fret is likely to manifest.  Arrrgh. 

The current agony, of course, is deciding which books get picked up off the floor & put on them.  If it were even as straightforward as that:  I now have x new dimensions of bookshelves, wherein x + y ÷ pandemonium & uproar, maybe I should reorganise‡‡‡ my interesting attempts to put books together that might lead the deranged brain to look for them near one another?  There’s no point in Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress or the Terror of AI, none of these would be the least use to me.ɸ  No, sitting around on the floor surrounded by piles of books taller than my headɸɸ is the only practical way.  Unfortunately it’s not, um, very practical. 

It’s not just time & other human beings, you know?  I don’t interact well with ANYTHING.  Except storytelling.ɸɸɸ  So I will get up off the floor, leaving the tall piles of books where they are, waving gently in the wind of my graceless motion & the delicate flexing of the old, much-trodden Victorian floorboards as I lurch to my feet, & go back to story-in-progress.  & the next time I get up to make another cup of tea or fetch another blanket or throw another log on the fire, I will trip spectacularly over a tall pile of books I’d forgotten I was planning the future, safely shelved, of. 

* * *

* There are eras when I am not awake & moving by then, but we won’t go there, since we don’t have to.  I will remind you that I sleep in a dress, not a nightgown, that I have a wide & comprehensive wardrobe of shapeless jersey cotton dresses in mostly lurid colours & patterns, & when the lurid colours & patterns falter I enliven the proceedings with hoodies expressing mottos to live by & aprons of lurid colours & patterns, although I don’t have time to get the apron on if I’m still horizontal when the doorbell goes.  & the dress is all very well, & a good deal better than nothing^, but the hair standing on end & the blurred, slitted eyes kind of give the game away.  But the lurid & the patterns cheer me up when I have to start the repellent starting-the-day procedure.

^ Lurid colours & patterns = distraction.  I’m 73 years old this year, even if my actual birthday isn’t till November, & I look it.  I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s day, you know?

** During the pre-complete-sentence phase I can bark, moan, or grunt, & indeed will have done all of these things in the gruesome process of climbing out of bed, washing my face, clawing my hair out of my eyes, tying my apron on & in this weather wrapping a heavy sweater around as much of me as I can manage^, brewing the first cup of tea of the day, etc.  Mornings.  What a concept.^^

^  Sleeves.  You know.  Integrating the arm with the long tunnel-like hole of the garment you’re staring at, probably upside down.  Arrrgh.

^^ Not that getting up at noon is any better.  It’s the getting up part that is the problem.  Getting out of bed after something resembling+ sleep.  What a concept. 

+  Or, possibly, not resembling sleep.  This may be a clue about the getting up.

*** Semaphore, written note left under a rock on my front step, telegram, private bearer, Pony Express, helicopter drop.  I don’t recommend anyone leaving a message on any of the social media, even those where my name seems to appear.  I haven’t been on social media in YEARS.  & I think I did a comprehensive rant about the Evil that is Facebook when Blogdad & I were trying to pummel the hateful thing into letting us in so I could paste blog post links, because other people still seem to look at it.  Shouldn’t you be waxing the cat or knitting a jumper for a chilly octopus or something useful?

† Here’s another familiar rant:  yes, it is dismaying that I’ve managed to fill a four-bedroom house in five years but . ..  I was, just before sitting down to face trying to write another blog post, burrowing through my extensive collection of fabric remnants for the PERFECT remnant to patch a pair of socks.  I don’t usually patch socks because, socks, all that work & you hardly see them,^ but these have bright yellow pears^^ all over them & I’m not ready to give them up yet.  So in approximately the third large box of fabric bin ends & offcuts I FOUND THE PERFECT REMNANT.  Which I fell upon with gladness.  The point being that I looked through a lot of shreds & vestiges first, & if I hadn’t found the exact-to-requirements wee tiny cloth atom, I’d’ve had to go on line & find more remnants.  So there is method to my madness.  The originating madness I think is past curing.^^^

^ I really have to double down & relearn to darn.  But a small dapper patch with tiny stitches works on ordinary socks.  & my somewhat embarrassing bodge for mending heavy wool socks is to knit the repair & then sew it in.  Works.  Mrs Beeton wouldn’t approve but hey.

^^ Sic. 

^^^ When I was bell ringing several days a week, I had to leave the bells behind in the church tower.  Handbells, now . . . Peter actually consulted Niall about buying me a set of handbells, & Niall advised against.  At the time this was a my-best-interests-at-heart friendly thing to do, but now . . . if I had my own set of handbells would I have started a local change-ringing handbell group by now???  What a very good thing I do not have my own set of handbells.+

+ Although, you know, a set of handbells doesn’t take up that much physical space.

†† large, four-bedroomed

††† one open fireplace, two woodstoves.  & five more non-functioning chimneys, because this is a Victorian house, & that’s how they did it.  ALL EIGHT CHIMNEYS ARE NOW BRISTLING WITH ANTI-SEAGULL SPIKES.

‡ This wasn’t a problem back in the cottage in Hampshire, where I had restricted myself to lurid paint on the walls.^  Narrow crevasses & glimmers of paint through bookshelves is adequate.  This is a much bigger house with, duh, more wall space.  But if you’ve got cabbage roses the size of your head on your walls, you want to see them.  Likewise vast bouquets of lilacs. ^^

It’s always some blasted thing confounding your attempt to lead the perfect life.^^^ 

^ Yes, you perceive a pattern.  Maybe I should try shellacking some of my aprons.

^^ I think I’ve also told you that the bloke who put up my wallpaper was amazing.  His pattern joins aren’t just neat & precise, they’re art.  You can stand in hushed admiration in front of a corner, watching roses or lilacs flow flawlessly around the room as if you’re at the theatre.  You don’t want to cover up masterpieces with bookshelves.  I mean even with bookshelves.

^^^ ::falls down laughing maniacally::

‡‡ My carpenter knows what he’s doing.  Therefore the fact that the ones in the big front guest^ bedroom are crooked is because the wall is crooked.^^  SIIIIIIIIGH.  By the time I get them loaded up I figure it won’t show.  If it shows, I can confuse the issue with Little Noodgy Things, cracked mugs full of fake flowers, dog cartoons, rude buttons, etc.

^ Guests are required to be thin, nimble & entirely free from claustrophobia

^^ Old houses.  Most of the time I find the wonkiness & unpredictability charming—I may be doing a little projecting here—but I like my bookshelves reassuringly horizontal.  This is probably a sign of a weak character.+

+ Buying too many books# is not the sign of a weak character.  HMMPH.

# Define too many

‡‡‡ whatever that means

ɸ I did say deranged brain.  Unless there was a card catalogue involved.  SIIIIIIIIIIGH.  I’m old enough still to be romantic about card catalogues.  You can be as deranged as you like if you are making up your own categories on little white cards.^  It doesn’t work somehow, doing it on your Battery Operated Personal Device.  Somehow derangement stops being fun when it’s filtered through enigmatic technology that you know is secretly tsking at you.  A nice stack of 3×5 cards & a pen with a nib & a bottomless supply of black (black) ink is what is wanted.  Except, you know, TIME TO PURSUE YET ANOTHER UNATTAINABLE PERFECTION?  Time.  That many-taloned fiend of mortal frustration.  At the very teetery top pinnacle of the list of things I don’t have the genes to deal with. 

^ Possibly in piles as tall as your head, see next footnote 

ɸɸ Taller than my head while sitting on the floor, I wish to emphasise.  Not only might Genghis or I suffer major injury should a pile of books taller than my head standing up fall over, the books might get their covers bashed & their pages crumpled.  Perish forfend.^

^  Also.  I’m not that great a stacker.  A pile of books taller than my standing-up head will fall over.

ɸɸɸ I hope.