I'm the last person you could call shopaholic. I don't go into shops but for food and the Saturday paper. You won't find me in Moss Bros choosing between their range of cravats.
Ordering books and records via the interweb is a problem, though. It should be a notifiable disease and the NHS, notoriously awash with money, ought to make treatment of it a priority.
Time was I'd have one book I was reading, plus poetry books or magazines and nearing the end of one would realize it was time to decide what to read next. Unfortunately now, over the last couple of years, the addictive ease with which they can be acquired and the thrill of satisfying the addiction has belatedly got out of hand. Those that I never got round to are piling up steadily while Elizabeth Bishops Selected Letters run to 600 pages, the Buxtehude book will have to be left after the biographjy and background sections, Jean Rhys' stories are on their way, I ordered Neil Powell's Collected Poems, having forgotten that I had the Selected and by no means read all of that and the year is already mapped out ahead with pre-orders of essentials like Danny Baker, Sean O'Brien, Thom Gunn, Arundhati Roy, Murakami and Douglas Dunn.
I'm never quite sure we should be reading people's letters and so I won't be going any further into Elizabeth's after the selected highlights.
Since arranging the 'classical' CD's on new shelves two years ago, they've expanded to fill nearly another shelf and where we go after that is a problem for the librarian I never became. Radio 3 had to play a gorgeous aria from an opera by Bononcini, sung by Lawrence Zazzo, a countertenor not yet in the collection so that had to be found; Record Review's record of the week was The Seasons with Carolyn Sampson and I couldn't hurt her feelings by not buying that and I thought 29 discs of Buxtehude might mean I didn't have to buy any more music for a long time. Don't have to; somehow need to, though.
So I am grateful to poets like Kathryn Gray who writes with great insight about not writing poems. It is Good Grief to think that her first book, The Never-Never, was 2004 and an admirable thing that she didn't try to provide a quick follow up when nothing came to mind. I feel much the same way, that if poems don't demand that you write them, there is not much to be gained by going in search of them. There are enough poets doing that already. But her new pamphlet should thus be the more welcome as it comes with the endorsement that she thought it worthwhile.
Over the weekend, I did a survey of my neglected folder of poems. It hasn't been significantly added to for quite some time so how do its contents look now, having had time to settle and mature.
Not as bad as they could be. Nothing got relegated from the A list to the B list from which nothing ever returns so there are 16 or 17, plenty to meet the usual four year cycle of making a booklet but, then again, a foundation on which to build something slightly more substantial and aspire to pamphlet
status, if ever the fugitive muse were to revisit. Meanwhile, knocking out song words on the off-chance that rumours of a vogue for Country music mean that there's an outside chance I could have a hit record, now there's nice work if you can get it.
Meanwhile, one small initiative to make inroads into the reading has been to not buy a Sunday paper. I hadn't realized until it was pointed out to me that The Observer is no good. The high-minded might point out that The News of the World was the same every week with stories of sordid celebrity liaisons but so is The Observer with its precious concerns. I hope I'm not going to turn into the natural successor to A.A. Gill but, yes, we know, and, no, I don't want to go and see Barclay James Harvest in concert. I don't want to be part of any demographic that thinks I'm the target audience for that.
The proper appreciation of books is the reading of them, not the purchase of them. It's gone far enough. From now on, it has to be essential buying only until I've read about Harold Wilson, Hereward the Wake and Delmore Schwartz, the unlikely trio of biographies that are sidelined and waiting forlornly for my attention. I'm lucky that the addiction is subsidized by my astute judgement on selected markets at Paddy Power. I could have been more astute yesterday, however. Not prepared to back Mark Selby for the snooker final at the odds available when he was level at 2-2, I thought I'd wait and see if he went behind, which he did, so I backed him when he was 2-4 down. I wish I'd waited until he was losing 4-10, then I could have ordered the Symphonies of Brahms, more Schumann, taken out a subscription to Gramophone, etc.