This is What Busy Looks Like
Ok. This blog post has taken an hour so far. Miss 11 and Miss 12 were allowed to stay up to watch the European Cup football tournament on TV. I've just had to lecture them – that if the mayhem unfolding upstairs didn't end immediately, there would be no more staying up to watch the football. It worked for about thirty seconds.
They are now in bed. Finally.
I'm sitting in the dark of the study at home again. I'm writing this in Google Docs. I've taken to writing in Google Docs because it saves stuff as you go along. You literally cannot lose your work. Bit by bit, we are storing less and less stuff on the computers at home. All of the photos are in the cloud now, and we stream music and movies. We sold nearly all of our DVDs a few months ago – I imagine the CDs will be next.
We're never selling the books. We have a house full of books. Hundreds, if not thousands of them. One entire end of the lounge is lined with floor to ceiling book shelves. Another bookshelf sits behind me in the study. Each of the children's bedrooms has another bookshelf, and the playroom has yet another bookshelf. Yes, we love the ease of the Kindle, but it will never be the same as sitting with a paper book. In many cases I've ended up buying the paper version of a book first, and then the digital copy to make it easy to read on the train. Insane, I know.
Nothing will ever replace the atmosphere of a second hand book store. You never know what book you might find, tucked away in a dark corner. I love looking inside the cover of second and third hand childrens books – to see if they have messages written in them – of Christmases and birthdays long ago.
I remember a camping holiday we went on before we had children – where it rained one day, and we sat in a nearby pub, in front of the fire – with a couple of bottles of wine, and books we had found in a second hand bookshop in the nearest village.
Now if you'll excuse me, I might have to go make a cup of tea, and find a book to read.