Day after tomorrow I have movers coming. They have already shaken their heads at the sight of my stuff and sucked their lips and said it would be a lot cheaper if I packed myself and could I be sure my bed was fully disassembled before 8 am?

I want to have hired the kind of movers who will, without demure, pack up my breakfast and deliver a half eaten egg hours later at my new home.  

I don’t want the cold egg and I don’t have a new home.  But I also don’t want the alternative, which turns out to be examining every object I have accidentally acquired these 25 years and asking, Is it worthy enough to be moved?  Is it valuable enough to be stored? 

I worry that when the objects are gone I might forget to tell the stories, so like some capricious god I preserve a few and pitch away the rest.  Amongst the Saved are all the birthday cards from my elder son and the doll given to my elder daughter by a mad, middle-aged Japanese graduate student, former nun obsessed with Iris Murdoch’s husband.  I also preserve the crumpled school play programmes wherever I see the name of my younger son, all grown up and off to drama school, and a sweet, lumpy, spotted pig fashioned in clay by my Baby her first term at school.  I don’t think she is going to be a sculptor, but I expect she will forgive my semi-formed sentimentality, matching her pig.  It’s the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, books turn out to pose the greatest difficulty. I got rid of boxes and boxes of books (meaning I donated them to Oxfam) when I first put the house on the market in 2006, but it seems I have acquired more books since.  I ought to pitch them, but it’s so hard. I look at each book and think there is a possibility I might want to read that again.  Or I might want to give it another chance and read it a first time.  Or it’s a book no reasonable household should be without, just in case someone might want to put it in a footnote. 

And there are books that might actually be useful, like the London A-Z.  I need that a lot and often forget to take it with me, so I buy a new one.  I used to say that when I retired I would set up a used book store selling back editions of the London A-Z.  It would be a niche market. I’m a few years from retirement yet, but only found 8 copies today.  I thought there would be more.  Apparently I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Besides the A-Zs, there were 3 copies of The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins), probably not a best seller even in my retirement bookstore, and 4 copies of the same edition of The Aeneid, A New English Translation. 

I think my first book cull must have been incomplete.  I refuse to accept that I am accruing copies of the Aeneid, even in translation, at a rate of more than one per year.

So that brings me to today’s game.  Which books appear more than once on your shelves?  (optional: How many times?  Why?)  I am so disorganised that I am not even going to count books where I have merely two, but in better regulated households two is a quorum and eligible to play.