All around my house - in the bedroom, the spare room, the sitting room -
there are interesting geological features. This is nothing to do with the fact
that I live in a Victorian townhouse in North London, nor to do with the clay
soil on which it is built. It's because I don't have enough shelves.
These interesting features consist of stalagmites of books - great wobbly
pillars of varying heights constantly threatening to come crashing down, which
they sometimes do at night, frightening the life out of our two understandably
nervous cats. They seem to grow on their own, these columns, much in the way
that wire coathangers will multiply if you leave them alone in an empty
wardrobe (have you ever noticed that?). Recently, I removed a couple of
stalagmites from the stairs because guests were coming. I was imagining the
lawsuit when one of them tripped halfway down and somersaulted into the hallway
while being showered by contemporary fiction - a bit like the demise of the
unfortunate Leonard Bast in EM Forster's Howard's
End, felled by a bookcase. The stalagmites haven't made it to the
bathroom yet but it's only a matter of time.
Read
on...
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