Bookshelves just one battleground in the mental war of moving house

As you fire one more item, you get chilly little reminders that you are the offspring of your parents

ANY GOOD shrink will tell you that when you move house, you get a kick in the psyche. The experience is one of six predictable life stressors. Stressors, which taken at the flood, can lead to physical or mental disaster.

In the US, one psychologist has taken it further. She says even renovating a bit of your home can make your mental stability go a bit bendy and your relationships with those close to you a tad incendiary.

On the face of it, this makes no sense. People renovating a house are going to get a great end result: an extension where the children can be got out of your hair without telling them to go play in the traffic. But so emotionally fraught is this task that there’s a whole new sub-species of psychology devoted to it in the US called renovation therapy.

For people who, rather than renovate, pack up and leave the old house altogether, the trauma is arguably worse. It’s dismaying to realise just how much of one’s life, at the point of moving, should have been in a skip years before. As you fire one more item, cherished for years against the possibility of it being needed one day, you get chilly little reminders that you are the offspring of your parents and that the day is not far off when you’ll be creating little rolls of twine (because you never know the day nor the hour) or saving rubber bands or giving a special slot in a drawer to that spoon your son used the day he was short of a screwdriver. (You don’t want it in with the rest of the cutlery, but if the urge comes on him again, neither do you want him making any more inroads on the good stuff.)

Moving house forces you to make choices that settled living does not. Clothes you might keep for decades get packaged up and sent to charity shops, because they almost leap from the back of the wardrobe, flailing their empty sleeves.

“Let me go,” they beg. “You’re never going to fit in me ever again. Stop kidding yourself about losing pounds after Christmas.”

Worst of all is when the bookshelves aren’t yet built in the new house, and you can’t get around to building them without wrecking the fragile order in the new/old house. As is my current situation. Out the back are dozens of plastic crates filled with books. Volumes testifying to a life of obsessive unmanaged unsystematic reading. The prayer book I had as a seven-year-old, with a pastel sketch of Maria Goretti looking wearily patient and mildly pretty, neither of which seemed an appropriate response to what had clearly happened to her, since the picture also showed she’d been stabbed in the neck.

The plastic crates hold thousands of books, each of them a friend, a precious friend, none of them reachable. Not only that, but precisely the wrong books are in the shelves, because although the new house did have one bookshelf, it was big enough to take only perhaps 30 books.

Decisions had to be made. I assumed I couldn’t live without dictionaries, books of quotations and cookbooks. So I put my most beloved books in plastic coffins in the shed out the back, and put the Important Resources on the shelves, ever-braced to correct and remind and reprove.

Of course, by the time it became apparent that I had chosen bad company, a million other crates had lined up, Berlin Wall-fashion, to separate me from my coffined friends until the building job is complete and I can be properly reunited with them.

When you don’t have bookshelves (or when the available bookshelves are filled with broad-shouldered authority figures like Bartlett and Fowler) you develop a whole new attitude to each new book. You want it to be so wonderful that you have no choice to give it to your best friend immediately, or so God-awful you can immediately hand it on to someone you’re not that keen on. The reason you’re not keen on them is precisely the reason they’d like the book, so you get to make two unspoken criticisms at the one go.

Last week, the Matt Cooper radio programme sent me a book to review, which didn’t fit in either category. By James Watson, the co-finder of the DNA helix, it was full of a delight about his own life which — early on — morphed into a satisfaction with self which made its author and his book a bore. I hated it so much, I was dying to get rid of it. I just don’t dislike any human being enough to send it to them.

On the other hand, during the same week, I was given a present of a modest little paperback published by Veritas which is way too good to lend. It’s the kind of book which, with its Chagall painting of a crucifixion on the cover, looks like a volume you’d put away, comfortable that you’d read it some day, but never quite get around to it.

Except that this little paperback is one of those you can open anywhere at random and find a delight. Like where the author — novelist and RTÉ man Aidan Mathews — describes his father as having been of a generation which combined “religiosity with a slight, sardonic anticlericalism”. The minute you read a phrase like that, you a) snap your fingers in recognition of its truth, and b) wish you’d said it.

The book, called In The Poorer Quarters, is built upon the scripts for an eponymous radio programme. It reminds readers that, once upon a time the opposite of the word “religious” was “irreligious”. Then people found that too negative, and softened it to “non-religious”. These days, the term non-believers use to describe their state (assuming they haven’t made it across the fence to avowed atheism) is “spiritual”.

“I would be prepared to believe in a higher power,” they say, gesturing in a flowing way with their hands to suggest the higher power is an invisible stream of warm air, like the Gulf Stream only more personal. Their tone is one of broadminded tolerance: they’re giving a hypothetical higher power permission to exist, if it really wants to.

People espousing this kind of loose spirituality have always had a big payoff, as Aidan Mathews points out. Not least the sense of being a courageous voyager: “You had the cultural prestige of having cut your own path through the wilderness without any assistance from those awful ordinary Christians who fill the smelly churches with their body odours and their bawling children, let alone the bronchial geriatrics on their walking frames who pass wind during the Eucharistic prayer.”

It sounds unkind, but that’s the one thing this book isn’t. It’s poetry, insight and challenge in one little volume.

Which, until I get the new shelves built, it’ll be hidden behind the dictionary on the existing shelf.

Lest anybody ask for a loan.