More of the Earth’s Children series, the other one is on the wrong shelf and the final of the six is hardback so doesn’t fit. I confess that I have retaken some photos after rearranging some books, but not this shelf. There were some Fitzgerald in the photo from a couple of days ago but I didn’t say anything about him. That’s because I read his books but without much meaning attached, reading just to pass the time perhaps? But yet still part of that habit of reading all that a writer has to offer.

I did the same with…

I got my first camera just before travelling to Amsterdam on a hovercraft. I have some terrible photographs from that camera, dispelling any notion that talent could be genetic. Nevertheless, I tried again, later. I was eighteen and I had a Pentax SLR. I was squatting in an old office block in the old Covent Garden. This was mere months before Covent Garden’s transformation and already it was a tourist trap. We took to wearing t-shirts with “I’m not a tourist, I live here” emblazoned. I am not sure if their intent worked, we were still asked questions every step…

I wonder if every book we read leaves an imprint on our mind, whether we remember them or not. I grew to like Thomas Hardy, thank goodness, as I studied him twice for exams both at O and A level. His stories I prefer to read than watch, unlike Austen, who I prefer to watch. I didn’t know that there had been nine adaptations of Crime & Punishment, so that’s not why it’s on my shelf. It arrived during my Russian reading period, which started with Solzhenitsyn, progressing to Dostoyevsky and much later Ratushinskaya. I must have been a terribly…

Kate Millet’s “The Loony Bin Trap” along with “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness” by Kay Redfield Jamison (which I have lent to a friend, I often lend this one to friends, I’ve had to replace it twice) are the best books I have read about manic-depression and bipolar disorder. There is a limit to how many stories like this I think a reader can subject themselves to, but it is important to make that effort. It’s important to understand how others reflect on their own mental health. It’s important to be able to reflect on one’s…

All the little books live on a shelf especially made for them. In Linton, these were tucked into the crevices at the top of the library shelves in between the timber beams of my 1604 house. Here, Rick built me these. I love plywood as furniture which is something that Lori introduced me to when she built me a desk. I didn’t bring the desk with me but I did bring the idea.

My grandmother died in New York a couple of weeks before her one hundred and third birthday. We had a week to sort out the apartment she…

All of these are work and work in progress except for Eddie Izzard’s autobiography. And I am so happy I have found it… Must read it! I am a fan. He makes me laugh and he makes me think differently about life. I admire him too, his marathons are as insane and admirable as he is. But my strongest memory was seeing his performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 2001. I went with Lori. At one point the cast broke out of the play and riffed in front of the safety curtain. I wept with…

I’m glad I have a copy of the Female Eunuch even if I have only read parts of it. Germaine Greer lived or often stayed in a village near Linton, one day I was looking out the window and saw a dog running up the High Street and a woman shouting, but it was more like panicked screaming. I rushed out and tore off after the dog, stepped on it’s trailing lead and recaptured Germaine Greer’s dog! I am a superhero in disguise. She, dressed in sloppy joes, was very flustered but grateful in a grumpy Greer type way. …