For years charity shops, market stalls, oil rigs and recommendations have been my library, countless books, many of them of rather dubious quality have been consumed in various quantities at various times.

Now and then I would come across a “keeper” those ones have traveled with me, first one box then two growing to half a dozen or more and several windowsills besides.

When we moved into our current lodgings, a place to stay for a while and raise our boys, one of my first thoughts was “great, I’ll buy a bookcase and have a proper home for them”.

Well it’s six or seven years since then and still no bookcase, although the boys have shelves and trunks dedicated to theirs.

I had a birthday a few weeks back, apparently it was some sort of milestone, though fortunately it passed as only a minor blip in the radar – but most notably, I got a bookcase.

Down came the boxes from the loft – God knows how I got them up there in the first place as it was an afternoons work to maneuver them down. Dead moths and flies were displaced from their book lined windowsill graveyards and all the books gathered in a great congregation in the dining room

Books I hadn’t seen in years.

As I arranged them all in piles I decided on a cull, Innes, McLean et al didn’t make it, just the books that had captured the imagination or started a train of thought. Books that stirred the blood of a younger me.

Wilbur Smith survived, his tales of adventure and hardship, of Trek Boers, Hottentots and Zulu warriors, vast continents and distances – death, sex and surviving the odds played no small part in the waking dreamscape of my teenage years.

Two or three of the boxes disappeared back to the charity shops.

It’s a fairly eclectic collection that remains, a random assortment of fiction, militaria, political and geographical. Journals and memoirs of interesting people and a growing number of philosophers.

Somewhere to store my 1:50000 Ordinance Survey maps – the only group with order, an easy retrieve with no diving into the back of a wardrobe with headtorch required before a day in the hills.

There’s something comforting about being surrounded by books, the sight, touch and smell, I now have a bookcase full of books (plus one windowsill and a small pile), somewhere to sit beside with a coffee and read whenever there is five minutes peace to be had.

The bottom shelf is full of adventure books for the boys, patiently waiting until they’re old enough to awaken a wanderlust and a thirst for adventure.

I wonder how long it will be until I need another one.