He moved it around every so often. When he found himself tripping over the pile of books on the floor one more time and he knew had to find some space. Books came, books went, that was his view. Some of them he even read. Some of them he didn’t, such was the obsession he had with his books. ‘One day I’ll read it’, he would say to himself and then a fad or fancy would wear off and some other passion would take its place.

Now and then Allan would do a charity shop run and amongst all the other trivia making that final journey out of his doors—stuff which had bubbled to the top of the discard pile—he’d have a ‘library’ clear out as well. Each time he found himself making a decision on the scruffy book, with the substantial brown paper covering (like no-one does any more, he told himself). He’d look at the last page of the story (without reading the ending of course, for that was a heinous crime) and see that it was over a thousand pages long and sigh, put it back on the shelf and tell himself that one day, he would make the time to do justice to ‘Gone with the Wind’.