Smoke Gets In Your Books

I was so impressed some years ago reading a convocation address given by that great, and possibly even more significant, wise, Canadian novelist Robertson Davies (to be found in his wonderful collection The Merry Heart) that I immediately took its key idea to heart and then took several years to actually do it.

The central idea was simple enough, the whole address wonderfully elegant and funny: Get yourself a good anthology of poetry, and keep it by your bed. (By the way, isn't it odd that in the advice of the great and good we hear on occasions of note in school we rarely hear anything pithy or that we didn't already know? Not complaining, this is simply the way of things.)

So last December I finally acquired the said volume (a suitable anthology), dirt cheap in a charity bookshop in Hyde. It sat on the floor of Mum's front room for a couple of weeks before traversing the globe, to wind up on the Mansion's bedside table, as above, my side. However, in its temporary sojourn on Mum's carpet it seems to have been more affected than is usual with anything I keep there from the fumes of the numerous ciggies she gets through in a day. Three months have passed and the anthology smells like it had spent its life on the inside of a gentlemen's smoking club. Possibly it had, and I never noticed at the time.

Anyway, it certainly lends the tome character, and is peculiarly in keeping with the oddly, to my mind, smoky sort of cover.

By the way, the lamp pictured above was my Christmas present when I was seventeen. It was really quite funky then. It no longer works, not that there's anything wrong with the lamp itself, but the wall socket gave up the ghost a couple of years back and we can't be bothered to trouble the landlady with repairs.

I suppose the subtext of all this, is that it's good, exceedingly so, to be back at home among familiar friends.