I was gifted a subscription to the London Review of Books, and already I don't know how I ever survived without it. I inhabit a house of books: they sit like the photographs as a record of a person I used to be, a person who read a dozen books a month, gobbled them up greedily - the haute cuisine, the junk food, the snacks, the banquets; my bookcases a smorgasbord of food for thought.
Now when the London Review arrives, it reaches out, reaches back to the Ur-me, that girl who used to have such a busy, buzzing brain. I was so smart, once. Switched on and chock full of ideas. Now I am like one of those abandoned mining towns in Alaska, living amongst the ruins of myself. And then this clever, challenging publication appears on the counter and I feel those old circuits flickering as if they might still come back to life.
One of our au pairs once decided to surprise me while I was away on holiday by rearranging all the books in the house by colour as it "looks nice". Not a reader. I have never been able to reliably find anything since. I am thinking of arranging them by linked themes, so that only people who have read them would understand why they were together.
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