About how I got here
My mother taught me to read and by the time I arrived at infant school I was already a voracious reader.
In those days books were expensive so the library was my friend. When I first visited it in the sixties Fleet Library was still in what had clearly once been a private Edwardian house so it was a quirky series of individual rooms each full of books, and a strange and spooky place it was too.
In 1971 we moved to a new home closer to the library which, at about the same time, had also been moved into a new brick and concrete building now known as the Harlington Centre. In theory you could borrow four books at once but via some negotiation which, in retrospect, must have had the tacit agreement of library staff, I ended out with the ability to borrow eleven books at a time.
They would last me about a week.
When I was older and started owning and buying books they were clearly important to me as, when I got my first house in 1985, the first house contents policy I had explicitly mentioned the number of books I owned as collectively they were probably already my most expensive asset, not in value, as second hand books are generally worth very little, but in terms of replacement cost.
At some point around this time, as I now had a PC at home, I sat down and catalogued all my books and I see that as I type this I currently have 1,079. This is down from its peak: when we last moved house I had a bit of a purge, and it’s also likely to be missing some as I sometimes forget to catalogue new books, but it does give an idea of the size of the problem.
Anyway, that’s where I was … until Sunday 3rd February 2002 when, aged 41, I had a stroke.
That was an interesting time and it took me a fair while to realise that I wasn’t really reading any more. Why isn’t entirely clear but apparently I did damage to the attention and arousal part of my brain and the consequences of that seemed to be that reading books was now difficult. I could read newspapers, I could read social media posts, so short articles were fine ... but sustained reading was hard.
This isn’t to say it stopped. Over the years that followed I did read, intermittently, but never in the same way I had before and it was always an effort.
Then in 2023, on the back of discovered Rambling Readers (a Fediverse version of Goodreads), I set myself a new year’s resolution to read 52 books in a year, and I did. I wrote about that here.
In 2024 I tried a repeat, but didn’t do as well, but I am still reading more, which is good.
Meanwhile … although I’ve always had a blog, on which I post intermittently about random stuff, I now have a blog dedicated to my work on Highland Council and I post to https://paul.nairn.scot (hosted at Substack) most weeks and that got me thinking that I should write about reading and owning books and also use that writing as an opportunity to try Ghost which I can host myself.
So here it is, a new experiment in blogging. It may last a few weeks, it may turn into a big adventure. We’ll see how it goes.
