Rhapsody in blue velvet

On leaving, losing things and letting go

Blue velvet sofa, Minty Oxford bookshelf and handbag

I keep trying to sit down on the sofa that isn’t there. I take a few steps back from my desk, prepare to sink into the comfort of blue velvet, and then twitch my knees as my brain trips at the sight of sisal carpet where there should be a big blob of midnight blue.

I just made a cup of coffee and thought: I’ll sit, for a while, in the sunshine in the garden. While there is sunshine, while there is this beautiful garden. I thought this even though I just helped the guys from the Salvation Army load the garden furniture into their truck. First thing this morning, I scrubbed the bird-shit off it. Yesterday, I brushed down the velvet sofa, stroked it as if it were a beloved pet that had sat faithfully by my side, and then helped a man from Cambridge inch it down the stairs, out of the French windows and into his van.

I have been saying goodbye to an awful lot of things. On Thursday, it was the velvet chaise longue. I had spent many happy hours on it. I don’t think Anthony ever sat on it. Perhaps there’s something in the male mind that sees a tiny mahogany scroll and a slope of eau de nil velvet and thinks that if he allows himself to recline on it, he will wake up clutching smelling salts in a lacy bonnet. Anyway, it’s gone now. No more G & Ts in evening sunshine on blue velvet. No more Sunday mornings on eau de nil velvet reading about Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. No more lunches with friends on the patio by the pond. It’s over. This life is over. We have made our bed and, once we have dismantled and reassembled it, must lie in it.

In the next few days, I may well find myself stroking the beautiful beams, hugging the honey-coloured stone, looking out at the apple trees and the pear tree and the fig tree and the grapevines and the roses, and thinking: what the hell have we done.

It isn’t easy to leave the life and it isn’t easy to leave the stuff. Furniture is part of the texture of our lives. Literally, the texture: the rough grain of old wood (I love old wood!), the soft hug of velvet, the wicker (or faux wicker) of a garden chair, pressing its pattern into your thighs on a hot summer’s day. It’s part of what carries us, what comforts us even, as we work, eat, sleep, live, laugh - and sometimes weep. I would love to take all of it to our next home, but we can’t. We’re squeezing two households into one, which means that half of it has to go.

Charities, it turns out, only want things that are pristine. The Salvation Army spurned my parents’ beautiful Minty Oxford bookshelves: the height of fashion in Hoxton, but “we don’t take old stuff” said the guy who stood frowning in the place where the blue velvet sofa used to be. I had to pay to get rid of my sofa bed in London. I had to pay a man from the shop across the road to help me carry it down the stairs and it took two weeks of phone calls to Hackney Council to get them to pick it up. That was long after I’d booked a delivery and paid for it, and after the neighbours had complained on the WhatsApp group about it sitting on the pavement and after various people at the council had plucked an imaginative range of reasons for its non-collection from the ether, including the fact that it was “soaking wet” when it hadn’t rained.

I liked that sofa bed, but I didn’t love it. I loved the gnarled old dairy table that used to sit in my hall, the bed I slept in for 30 years, the Victorian wardrobe that housed my armour for the world, the chest that looked like a treasure chest that had been found at the bottom of an ocean. When I bought these things, I felt as if I was buying jewels. They are, it turns out, pretty much worthless now.

Buying things seems to be an awful lot easier than getting rid of them.

Worst of all was the books. Oh my God, the books. I had floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls in my study. I had a wall of poetry on the mezzanine. I had a wall of double-height shelves in the hall. I had, I think, more than 4000, though I never got round to counting them. As a reviewer, I get sent a lot of books and I’m used to getting rid of them. But this was something else.

Every book you say goodbye to is a statement about your life. Or, perhaps more accurately, a statement about your death. No, I am never going to read that book, or I am never going to read it again. That little part of you that has been clinging on to the fantasy that you are one day going to read the whole of Dickens or Trollope or Sir Walter Scott, or even any Trollope or Walter Scott, has come face to face with the cold, harsh fact that the person who might one day have done that probably never existed and the one that remains is now much more likely to be found scrolling through the news on her phone.

Spread out on those bookshelves was the soul of a polymath, a Renaissance woman just waiting to wow the world with the alchemy she has created from that blend of psychology, art, literature, poetry, politics, geopolitics, science, sociology, a woman steeped in culture, history and wisdom. The trouble is, the actual woman can’t remember much of what she has read and would have no idea what to do with it if she could.

As I went through my books, pile after pile after pile after pile, I often wasn’t sure whether I’d read a book or not. It was only when I saw the scrawls in the margin that I knew. Those scrawls, by the way, were their death warrant. Charity shops won’t take books with scrawls. I ordered two charity pick-ups for the unsullied ones, of fifteen boxes each. I persuaded a second-hand book dealer to take away a few boxes of the best. I threw out at least a thousand books. It nearly killed me to throw out those books. The rest I put in boxes and have kept.

And now I’ve been packing up the books here. I keep fishing some out and putting them to one side. Oh, I think I’ll just read that one on group psychology and that one on the essay form and that book about time management, which will surely be the one to change my life. I’ve been buying books, too. A couple of weeks ago, I bought 24 in an antiques emporium because they had such lovely covers. Half of them were Dickens. Yes, I’m aware of the irony. Chuck Dickens. Buy Dickens. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The others I bought because I needed to go to the loo in central London and the only place I could easily find one was in Waterstone’s. I spotted four books I desperately wanted to read. And so the pile grows, even as it’s meant to shrink.

I am built from books. I may not remember them. I may feel terrible when I go into a bookshop because there are so many books I’m never going to read and because my own books will be lost in that mass of printed paper, if they’ve even made it into the shop, and what’s the point of adding to those piles, but what’s the point of anything else? But where else do we find the flashes of whatever it is that explains to us what it is to be creatures that nest and home and want to line our homes with scraps of pretty stuff and with things that make us feel special and wise even as young men are slaughtering teenagers at a music festival and taking elderly women as hostages and gunning down toddlers in the street?

I don’t know how this happens. I don’t know what happens in the human brain for young men to think this is a good thing to do. I don’t know how I can hear about these things and still think about a blue velvet sofa. But they do, and I do, and I will keep reading books to help me understand, or cling to the illusion that I can understand, and that I will one day find the answer to that, and to everything else.