Trying To Be Hard
Jan. 8th, 2022 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloWendy, who comes in and cleans for us, has called in sick. It isn't covid but something else. I'm recovering from something else myself- a protective overreaction of the upper respiratory tract caused- I think- by having cut flowers in the house. I wish people wouldn't gift us with cut flowers. Yes, they're very pretty, but I hate it that they've been killed for our pleasure- and, besides their pollen gets up my nose and incapacitates me. Next time someone sends us flowers I'm going to go, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," and put them straight on the compost heap.
I'm packing books. We have lots of books. Last time we moved we found the handiest things to load them into were supermarket shopping bags- and we've bought a large number of bags so we can do it again. As I go I weed the collection. Do we need two sets of Jane Austen? Do we need two copies of Boswell's London Journal? Do we need more than one guide to British birds? Do we need an incomplete edition of the plays of Jean Racine (in French) which my mother bought or was issued with as study texts in Neuchatel in the 1930s and no-one has glanced at since? I get very sentimental about books- as objects with a history quite apart from what they contain- but I'm trying to be hard.
I was thinking we'd buy new book shelves for the new house- and lose the ill-assorted collection of bookcases we currently make do with- but then I saw the prices...
The brief period of cold clear weather is over- and we're back to grey skies and mizzling rain...
I'm packing books. We have lots of books. Last time we moved we found the handiest things to load them into were supermarket shopping bags- and we've bought a large number of bags so we can do it again. As I go I weed the collection. Do we need two sets of Jane Austen? Do we need two copies of Boswell's London Journal? Do we need more than one guide to British birds? Do we need an incomplete edition of the plays of Jean Racine (in French) which my mother bought or was issued with as study texts in Neuchatel in the 1930s and no-one has glanced at since? I get very sentimental about books- as objects with a history quite apart from what they contain- but I'm trying to be hard.
I was thinking we'd buy new book shelves for the new house- and lose the ill-assorted collection of bookcases we currently make do with- but then I saw the prices...
The brief period of cold clear weather is over- and we're back to grey skies and mizzling rain...
