Going primitive

I have just made an offer for a house. Or, to be accurate, a converted Primitive Methodist chapel, built with an eye to eternity in 1875.

I like to think that the Hann family will be fitting occupants since my two sons are indisputably primitive, if not knowingly Methodist. While my wife’s assertion that she is a Muslim (only ever made to callers hoping that she might become a witness for Jehovah) will surely have added piquancy when delivered from a quasi-ecclesiastical doorstep.

My late mother was raised a Presbyterian and regarded other nonconformist sects with due suspicion. She liked to quote the neighbour who came round each Christmas and announced self-righteously: “I’ll take no strong drink, thank you, I’m a Methodist. I’ll just have a glass of port.”

My parents duly had me christened by the Presbyterian Church of England, which was a godsend for a cynic as it allowed me to joke that they had entrusted the care of my immortal soul to an organisation that had disappeared (through a merger with the Congregationalists) by the time I was 18.

The old lady who currently occupies our prospective home tells me that she receives occasional visits from people who were married or baptised there. If our purchase goes through, I shall try to treat these callers with good grace.

I have never understood the mentality of those who live in converted railway stations, signal boxes and goods sheds, and then festoon them with notices designed to repel the train nerds they inevitably attract. (Though I write that as a bit of a train nerd myself.)

At least I imagine that chapel spotters are rather less obsessive than their railway equivalents.

It undoubtedly helps that the chapel is not registered as being of any particular architectural or historic interest, and that it does not possess a burial ground. Someone I vaguely know bought a converted parish church where the graveyard was still in occasional use. Although not in the least superstitious himself, he did admit that it was vaguely disconcerting to pull back the curtains of a morning and find a black-clad party clustered around an open grave just beyond his hardy perennials.

Mrs Hann and I first visited the chapel on our own the weekend before last, and decided to make an offer after a second tour accompanied by our children. Four-year-old Charlie’s tactlessly loud assertion that it was “rubbish” was just the confirmation we felt we needed. Added to which, it is just down the road from his very good state school.

We now have to overcome three major hurdles. First, a structural survey to determine whether the uneven roof line and numerous loose tiles obvious even to me require a bit of tidying up or a full scale reconstruction. (If the latter, I wonder how far I might get with one of those church roof appeals, with a thermometer-like sign tracking progress to date?)

Second, finding someone daft enough to lend me the money until my current house sells.

And finally, extricating the present incumbent, who has clearly devoted much of her life to collecting stuff in a way with which I can sympathise all too well. I naturally agreed on Saturday that we would like to keep the pews and refectory-style table which fit so well in the kitchen. Then she suggested that each of our boys would surely like one of her Victorian school desks.

At this point Mrs Hann took me to one side for “a quiet word” about my propensity to act as an open door when anyone has stuff to give away.

She is right, of course, as she usually is. Sometime this year I shall be forced to make some tough decisions about which of the many thousands of books I own, have never read and am never likely to read, I really must sell or give away.

If anyone would like to buy a house in Northumberland with stunningly lovely views and a ready-made library, majoring on classic and modern fiction, history, biography and railways, do please drop me a line.

Two unruly children and a fine pair of Border terriers may also be available by separate negotiation.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Books do furnish a room

You can tell a lot about a person from the books they read, or at any rate own. I have long found craftily scanning the shelves of new acquaintances a reliable way of assessing whether we might be on compatible wavelengths.

But even before the arrival of the Kindle (and remember, other tablet devices are available), books had begun to be banished from the sitting rooms of the fashion conscious. An estate agent helpfully suggested that it would increase my chances of selling my house if my four thousand plus volumes were less prominently displayed. I countered that they might well turn out to be the only things holding up the roof. Shortly afterwards I took my house off the market.

Then last week, for the first time in 24 years, I decided that the very lived-in look of my study was no longer tolerable, and braced myself to clear it out so that it could receive the attentions of a decorator. As a result I am now completely shattered, while the resulting boxes of displaced books are filling most of the rest of the house.

Not actually my study, but something to which I aspire

My whole life unfolded before me as I cleared the shelves. I even found Look & Learn, Dandy and Beano annuals from my childhood. My initial thought was that my two youngsters might appreciate these in a year or two. Then I remembered the habitual violence of 1960s cartoon parents and schoolteachers, and the casual racism of Corporal Clott in Africa, and realised that I could be accused of poisoning their minds to such an extent that they might have to be taken into care.

Corporal Clott: he used a lot of mysterious words like 'Sambo' and 'picaninny'

There were many well-worn classics I clearly remembered reading in my teens and twenties, along with crisp, almost new volumes I longed to have the time to read now. Only in many cases I glanced at the inside back cover, where around 20 years ago I started making a brief note every time I finished a book, and discovered that I had already read it, and promptly forgotten every detail.

Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have instituted a star rating system so that I would know whether a book was worth reading again. If only I had realised at the time that my brain was completely saturated with information, and incapable of absorbing more.

Not actually a joke to me now

The lessons for the young are to get your reading in early, when you may actually recall it, and to go for quality so that you do not reach your dotage with a memory stocked only with rubbish.

While for the old, at least being marooned on a desert island by BBC Radio 4 with just one book no longer represents a hardship, because it will be as fresh and enjoyable on its fiftieth reading as it was first time around.

I more or less stopped buying books a few years ago because I had completely run out of space, and realised that I would have to live to be 250 to get through the ones I already owned. And that was before I grasped that most of what I have read since the age of 40 had left only a vapour trail in my memory, rather than an indelible mark.

Now the question is whether I should bother to put the many hundreds of books back on their shelves, or consign them to a skip and devote more display space to my collection of Coronation mugs. It is a tough call. But on the whole I think I will put the books back on the off chance that they are indeed increasing the stability of the house, which stands on a very windy hilltop.

And at least I can console myself with the thought that, if I stick to a once in 24 year decorating cycle, I will surely not be around to face the nightmare task of clearing them out again.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Reflections from the life laundry

You know how it is when you start tidying up. As soon as you begin delving into cupboards and clearing shelves, you create a mess at least 100 times worse than the one you were trying to tackle in the first place.

If, like me, you are foolish enough to have thrown away virtually nothing for 20 years, the results of embarking on what I believe is called a “life laundry” are truly horrific.

I can barely move for stacks of books, videos (remember those?) clothes, toys, crockery and pictures, despite having occupied most of my spare time for the last week making repeated, heavily laden trips to the Alnwick household waste recycling centre.

The good news is that I have uncovered numerous interesting things I had completely forgotten acquiring. The bad news is that, after a couple of decades lurking at the back of slightly damp cupboards, most of them are too mildewed or rusty to be worth keeping.

There is a simple lesson here: do not buy things you do not really need. And, if they come as gifts, do not hesitate to recycle them swiftly through a charity shop, ideally one that is not frequented by the person who gave you the present in the first place.

I am belatedly taking my own advice now, though struggling to apply the necessary ruthlessness to books and papers. I feel attached to my extensive collection of reference books, though I never actually use them since it became so much easier to find the answer to everything on the internet. And I cannot quite face admitting the futility of having made and kept so many press cuttings, which I never look at again after they are filed.

There are well over a thousand unopened biographies, novels and historical works I bought because I was mad keen to read them. Indeed, five years ago I gave up my job in London primarily so that I could devote more time to this. What I was overlooking is the fact that the books you read in your teens and twenties stay with you forever, but by my time of life the brain has reached full capacity and little sticks.

Around the age of 40 I felt the need to start defacing my books with little notes to remind myself that I had actually read them, in the hope of preventing myself from doing so again. Now, like a castaway on Desert Island Discs, I really only need one book that I could read again and again, with a goldfish-like delight. Something by Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse, I fancy. There’s no point taking anything too seriously when your mind is going.

Albums of family photographs covering four generations also take up yards of shelf space, though at least that has stopped growing since the invention of the digital camera; a great boon given that more images must have been captured of my son in his first five months than of any of the previous generation of Hanns in all their three score years and ten, or thereabouts.

I was just going to sit here surrounded by my piles of junk until I expired, then let my unfortunate heirs sort the mess out. Now I have had to become my own executor before the baby starts crawling, to enable him to move around in relative safety.

Everyone told me that it would be really hard to do, but that I would feel much better afterwards. A bit like climbing Everest or stopping banging my head against a brick wall. It is perhaps too early for me to say, but I think I am beginning to see their point.

Possessions really are a burden. They tie us down. Memo to last week’s big lottery winners: buy nothing apart from a really good digital camera and one outstanding book.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.