Month: August 2019

I Arranged My Bookshelves

According to topic. Because I tried to do that Instagram thing of arranging according to colour, and it was an epic fail. I mean, it looked pretty. But it was perfectly useless. To find a book, I had to remember if it was a yellow book, or a red book and my books ended up with Jodi Picoult sitting next to Jordan Peterson. It did not make any sense. Another reminder that sometimes, social media trends don’t mean much in real life. This time, my shelves are arranged according to themes. Career. Fiction. Childcare. Interesting Non-Fiction. Husband’s mish-mash of books (because his taste is eclectic). The boys, bless their little souls, have one section of the shelf for their 5 Books of The Week. (No, I’m not a mean mom, but I simply cannot have dozens of children books in my living room. So they’re only allowed to keep 5 in the living room). I have boxes of books to give out. The first idea I had was to exchange them for vouchers at coffee …

On Ghosts From The Past.

What do you do when ghosts from your past darken your threshold? It’s the call from an ex that you don’t expect. First, incredulity. Then recovery. A stab at politeness, at small talk while all the time thinking, “What the bloody hell? How did you get this number?!” It’s the social media message from an old friend. Mutually probing. Tentative. Wondering. “Are you the same person I knew all those years ago? Has adulthood drowned the kindred spirit I once knew?” It’s chance encounters with people who you knew before. Before. And again the small talk. But not before awareness passes between you and you know, you recognise in them the missing of what was. It’s old diaries, pages musty with age, in longhand script that you no longer use because we type everything these days (gosh, I still love, love, love writing longhand!). It’s gibberish that, at the time, was everything and this time is nothing. What do you do when something calls an old name that you no longer answer to? Sometimes, you answer. It …