Author: Moobs

Three days ago I woke up at 5:30 am. It was my second day of less than 5 hours sleep and I found myself scratched by a familiar sensation. My thoughts scattered about, colliding. I could not return to sleep. Nor could I bring myself to open my eyes. I bunched the sheets in my fist and felt the wave break across the bedstead and engulf me: misery.

For two days I have been a chain hotel in Bristol surrounded by my temporary kin. I know that, within the hour, they will all be found together at breakfast. Each of them will be guiltily finishing a plate of bacon that was cooked much earlier and left to warm under serving lamp. They will be exhausted from the effort of kidding themselves and the strain of holding on to hope. They hope that by taking an apple from the breakfast buffet they will fend off the heart attack that their waxing obesity is foreshadowing. They hope that not putting on their ties will somehow allow them to forget they will soon resume work. They hope that by appearing engrossed in a book or newspaper others will not notice that they are alone: or that they will not notice it themselves. They hope that the midnight call to their wives will dull the ache of missing them rather than sharpen it. They hope to get the deal, make the sale, move up, get on and acquire seven habits that will mark the out as highly effective people.On their bedside table are pulpy books written by Americans with middle initials which promise to help them plumb, harness, focus and otherwise leverage their inner warrior/conciliator/facilitor or artist.

My misery is loneliness. To be away from P, sat in my underwear at 3 am typing out paragraphs of law at the cramped piece of MDF that passes for a desk, pulls the joy from my life in a single, shin-cracking, explosive decompression. I love her and the breezy and insincere bonhomie of the reception clerk is no compensation for the the mood that missing her conjures.

The case over, its a trip back home through the disintegrating chaos of our glorious transport system. As I arrive home the sky is pink and hatched with orange clouds. I open the gate and find my niece and nephew running in the garden chasing a football. Little Sam sees me and shouts “Uncle Moobs, we are all in the garden having fun!” He promptly trips onto his face and gets up laughing. My heart is full again.

P and I are packing for our bliptrip to Washington and points East. I am bringing my brand new and achingly sexy little Vaio so I hope to do a little bloggin while I’m there.

See you in the other side.

I really really love books. From my point of view, the house will not be finished until the last of the shelving is built in. When I was a boy I was a desperate and dweeby member of the Puffin Club and read as much as my pocket money allowed. From then on I have accumulated box after box of books. I have ranks of (Iain) Banks; mazy backstreets full of Dickens and Corinthian columns of Penguin Classics. For most of the last 4 years my little darlings have been in boxes in the garage. Now P menaces them like Herod with a hangover. For her the answer the Malthusian difficulty I have with the sheer number of books I possess is obvious: throw them out. But how can anyone, I ask you, throw a book away, even a raddled Penguin Modern Classic with yellowed leaves?

The answer used to be to give them to charity. However, when P turned up today with two boxfuls of the stuff I could bear to be parted from (in truth, they were mostly her holiday novels) Oxfam closed and bolted the door. I gather that most of the books dumped on them end up recycled in any event.

It is time to be strong. I will have to cull. Some of them I will hit with a spade and bury in a riverbank; others will have to be dropped mewling into the water in a sack. I know it must be done. But some were good attentive books that washed behind their ears and paid attention at school and somehow summarily executing them seems a brutal act. I would like to give these bright souls a chance to escape. Give them, as it were, a headstart, before my gap-toothed, hilly-billy pyschopaths and I start chasing them through the underbrush with a shotgun and a bottle of moonshine.

Would anyone, for instance, consider giving a home to the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”? I will happily wrap them and send them through the post to you at my expense. This is a no obligation offer and, if things don’t work out between you, you can always have them sew footballs for a dollar a day.