My bookish bind: heaven knows I’m literate now

COME back in time with me for a moment. Even though The Smiths weren’t the most successful rock group of the Eighties, they certainly made a bigger impact than most of their peers.

The common consensus is that their appeal principally lay in their eccentric singer Morrissey and his clever touch with words. Perhaps his finest moment was the song Handsome Devil and its immortal lyric: ‘There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.’

What a brilliant line. For reasons that will become clear, though, I’ve recently had cause to think about it in a slightly different way.

It all began a couple of months before Christmas when I bumped into my next-door neighbour one Saturday morning. Given that he was carrying some heavy-looking crates, I kept the conversation brief in case he asked me to give him a hand. But I managed to find out that he was moving stuff into storage because he was putting his home up for sale.

Just as he was shifting his possessions because he was selling up, it dawned on me that I’m going to have to do likewise if I want to stay where I am. We are talking clutter with a capital ‘C’ here. There is one particular room in my gaff where I am afraid to open the door, just in case the contents spill out and bury me alive.

You will have no doubt worked out by now that books are the problem. It would be well nigh impossible to do a full inventory of exactly how many we have Chez O’Reilly. Put it this way, though, we would at the very least need the latest mountaineering equipment and the assistance of a couple of Sherpas.

Nor, if you’ll pardon the pun, is this the full story. I’m fairly certain there is a sizeable stash of books belonging to me still taking up space in my parents’ attic, although I’ll no doubt regret reminding them of that.

Even more embarrassingly, a vast collection of volumes has had squatters’ rights in my parents-in-laws’ garage ever since me and Mrs O moved home at short notice almost two decades ago. Less than a year after that move, we’d already acquired enough new books to start a small library.

Pinpointing the root of the problem isn’t exactly rocket science. The bottom line is that I seem to be incapable of going into a bookshop and leaving without anything that looks even half-decent.

Even if I already have a handful of biographies and a couple of novels on the go at the time, I’ll still pick up something for future reading.

Problem is, there are unread books I’ve now had for so long that they probably qualify for antiquarian status.

I’ve even bought books in which I had practically zero interest. By way of example, I picked up a copy of Edward Bunker’s memoirs in a shop on the Charing Cross Road at least 15 years ago. Bunker, who died in 2005, was a former criminal who reinvented himself as an actor and author.

He is probably best known for his role as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, which I have no hesitation in dismissing as the most overrated picture in cinematic history. But I bought the book on the grounds that it was both autographed and inscribed with Bunker’s old prisoner number, so I thought it might be an interesting memento. Suffice to say that I never got around to reading it and have no idea where it is now.

Mind you, I should say that Mrs O has to shoulder some of the responsibility for the vast forest of printed matter that is threatening to engulf us. Her book habit is even more voracious than mine, but at least she gets around to reading the ones she buys.

Still, you’ve got to have a laugh. I’m reminded of the old joke about the woman who doesn’t know what to buy her son for his birthday. Trying to be helpful, one of her friends suggests getting him a book. ‘Oh no,’ comes the reply. ‘He has one of them already.’

If only I’d taken a similar approach, things might be different now. What’s that old saying about never being alone with a book? Tell me about it.