Four things came to mind when a neighbour’s ceramic bird-feeder shot past my study window before disintegrating with a crash against the garden wall. First, that Eunice was a fine name for the faith-filled mother of Timothy, whom we encounter once with St Paul’s approbation at 2 Timothy 1:5; secondly, that with its meaning of “good victory”, it was a ridiculous name for a storm, especially one that turned out to be fierce enough to claim a number of lives; thirdly, that the Herald’s editor was, by my reckoning, still somewhere on Hadrian’s Wall; fourthly, that I was in the lee of the wind, and safe, and warm, and dry.
With a number of writing projects on the go, I had intended to spend the day of Storm Eunice at the coast, indulging a romantic notion that grey and cold and dank in some way inspires creativity. Sitting at the seaside and taking in all that bracing air – either side of a fish and chips lunch drenched in vinegar and wrapped in paper – promised to be just the ticket, until the predicted 90-mile-an-hour gusts and 10-foot waves suddenly made the prospect considerably less appealing. Romanticism gave way to pragmatism, and I stayed at home instead; Mr Cash returned safely from the wilds of Northumberland, and wrote about his peregrinations in the March issue.
The problem with being confined to quarters is that there is always something that needs doing; it was one of the things that made the first lockdown in 2020 seem like Groundhog Day. In my case it usually involves books; books to be read, books to be reviewed, books to be sorted. As regards the last category, I am a librarian’s nightmare. My shelves are organised by subject and then by chronology, with the odd relevant novel tucked in here and there. The rest of the novels are on the shelves below poetry, which is all squished together; Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Mackay Brown rub shoulders with The Faber Book of Blue Verse. At least I am not the kind of psychopath who orders books by colour.
I know where everything is, broadly speaking, and it suits me just fine. Nevertheless, an influx of volumes over the last few months meant that a bit of tweaking was overdue. The wife of a former tutor of mine has instigated in his retirement a rule that for every book he brings into the house, two have to go. I have yet to achieve this level of discipline, but I managed to steel myself and send a few second copies to the college library, and impose others on students who had no option but to take them and appear grateful for this unsolicited benison of things that I no longer wanted.
Inevitably, too, some old favourites re-emerged along the way. My lovely Folio Society copy of Augustine’s Confessions, a treasured gift from my godfather; the charlatan Frederick Rolfe’s outrageous Hadrian the Seventh, which I love; my faithful paperback copy of Eusebius of Cæsarea’s History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, so well-thumbed that it is nearly falling apart. Some, however, did not. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was nowhere to be seen; nor was any of my full set of RH Benson, whose literary biography I long to write. Inter alia, my thumping copy of Ian Ker’s John Henry Newman was also missing, and too big for me to have simply mislaid.
I have clearly lent them out, and forgotten to whom. The Principal of St Stephen’s House, where I teach church history, insists on using his iPhone to photograph anyone who takes an item from his personal collection; it may not be such a bad idea. I have not particularly missed any of the books that I cannot now find, if I am honest, but it would be comforting to know that they were there. Finding an online reference is not as satisfying as taking a tome down from the shelves, blowing off the dust, and getting stuck into the pages. Sometimes I wonder how long it will be before I end up at a Mass where the Gospel is read from an electronic device: processed, censed and osculated. I already know that I will hate it.
It was on that sentimental ticket, meanwhile, that I found myself unable to part with some old friends that I hadn’t touched for years. I will one day return to Matthew Baylis’s Man Belong Mrs Queen, his study of the South Sea islanders who worshipped the late Prince Philip as a god; it was the best book that I ever found in a church bookstall. Christopher Hibbert’s King Mob, his history of the nominally anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 also survived the purge, although Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens’s fictional account of the same events, had disappeared. In the end, I even spared my copy of Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Holy Bible, which allows readers to find passages of scripture by using their significant nouns. It soon came in very handy for looking up “Eunice”.
This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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