A love affair with books

One of the great joys of being home again is being reunited with my books - I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. They fill whole walls of bookcases, litter the tables and chairs in the living room, pile up beside the bed, clutter the staircase and get rather soggy in the bathroom. They are like friends. Every now and then I vow to have a ruthless cull in order to make room for new ones. I weed out the tatty paperbacks, the pulp fiction and the old encyclopaedias, drive around for three weeks with the box in the boot of the car, somehow never make it to Oxfam and eventually bring them back home again.
When I was in London I found a children's book that describes just how I feel about books - it's called 'Dog Loves Books' and it's by a new children's author and illustrator (she's just 26) called Louise Yates. Like Dog, I love the smell and feel of books - in fact everything about them. I've been addicted since I was big enough to carry them around - as this old photograph shows.

This is one addiction I never want to be cured of!