Lost Books

One of the interesting things about moving house is the ability to discover things you thought you’d loss.

Which is not, in fact, a sneaky way of announcing that I’m moving again – twice in a six-months span is quite enough for me, thanks – but among the various errands that have been run over the last couple of weeks is the clearing out of stuff left behind in my flatmate’s old place, on account of the fact that he’s finally sold it.

Over the years I’ve come to accept that I’m quite terrible at moving house. I’ve done it quite a bit, and somehow I always manage to stop about 90% of the way through when the energy peters out just shy of unpacking the last few boxes. There’s always a handful of things that I basically move by taking empty boxes and throwing in a random assortment of stuff, and those boxes get moved from house to house without ever being unpacked.

Which is why, when I started moving stuff out from underneath the old place, I find a rather sizable box full of books that I’d packed for the move last December and somehow managed to forget about.

The weird part is that many of these books were ones that I tend to use quite often, and not being able to find them was driving me crazy for the last seven or eight months. I mean, it included the vast majority of the really good books on writing, which would have been handy when I was teaching courses a few months back (so handy, in fact, that I bought ebooks of two of them in frustration). It included a couple of books that were recent acquisitions just before I moved, all of which I’d been intending to read quite soon.

And it included my copy of Moby Dick, which I was halfway through reading and enjoying, if only because it was so freakin’ bizarre that you can’t help but enjoy it.

How in hell I’d dumped this box underneath the house and forgotten about it eludes me, but I’m willing to put a lot down to exhaustion and the desire to just be done with the move.

Moving stuff out of the old place,  incidentally, is also the reason there will be real-time blog-posts this week instead of stuff I worked up over the weekend. That, and I grew frustrated with the writing prompt exercise. Not enough to abandon it, but enough that I didn’t want to post ten straight posts based on prompts.