Booklovers never go to bed alone

I follow a blog called "booklovers never go to bed alone" which showcases a different photo of books everyday, and they have included a picture of one of my bookcases!

This is thrilling. I love browsing pictures of other people's book collections, and now people can see part of mine too.

My favourite picture from the site is this one which inspired me to start keeping the I-S section of my cd collection in a three story dolls house I found in the salvation army charity shop.

On the subject of going to bed alone, one of the things I like about being single is that when I've finished reading in bed at night I can put my book under the pillow, without comment from another person on the other side of the bed. This is something I have always done, sometimes to the point that the pillow becomes quite lumpy with three or four books under there and numerous girlfriends and boyfriends have found it strange. It's just the obvious place for me to keep a book I am reading in bed. But now if I end up with too many books under one pillow, I can sleep on the other side of the bed, because I have it to myself.

Another good thing about having my bed to myself is that I can let Milly (my cat) sleep in the room at night, because I don't mind if she jumps on to the bed whilst I'm sleeping.  In my last two relationships, it has always been suggested/insisted upon that she is shut out of the room overnight so that she can't jump up on to the bed and wake us up. And despite compelling arguments from both exes, I always felt bad not letting her sleep in my room at night. Now I am frequently woken up in the morning by her putting her face very close to my face, but I don't really mind. I like her to be happy, and I think being allowed to sleep on my bed with me makes her so.

Too much is never enough

This weekend I have:

• Made peanut butter waffles for my housemate and one of our friends
• Had a chat with a friend about a situation that is concerning her at work
• Gone for a walk through the woods to the plant nursery to get more plants for my garden
• Potted those plants on and tidied up the garden
• Made wild garlic pesto from scratch
• Done a load of washing
• Assembled two flat-pack bookcases and filled them with books
• Hemmed a piece of fabric for our tablecloth and made four matching napkins
• Fixed a hole in the shoulder seam of one of my jackets
• Altered the sleeves on a dress for a friend
• Unpacked several more boxes of things in my room
• Did a complete stocktake of all the zines in my distro, and calculated what I owe to various zinesters
• Had a shower and washed my hair
• Had a conversation with my sister on the phone
• Read the paper in it's entirety (minus the sport section)
• Tidied the shoe section of my wardrobe
• Watched "The Itty Bitty Titty Committee", the most recent episode of Glee and 500 days of summer

And yet at eleven o clock on Sunday night I can't shake the feeling that I haven't done enough, that I should have accomplished more. I can't work out if this is a genuine case of poor time management (which is why I have tried to list all the things I feel I have achieved) or if I have unrealistic expectations of what I can/should achieve on my two days off from work. I didn't get up until eleven today, and it was one o'clock before I got round to really doing anything, which made me feel like I was wasting my day.

I think part of the problem is that in my head I also have the list of things I "should have done":

• Gone grocery shopping
• Made a mixtape for a friend
• Written several letters
• Hoovering and general cleaning
• Finishing unpacking all the boxes in the living room and my bedroom
• Made lemon wine (which would involve buying sugar)
• Made a flyer for the "big lunch" street party I am organising next month

And as long as there are still items left on my "should have done" list then I feel dis-satisfied with the things I have done. It is eleven o'clock, I am tired but I can't go to sleep yet because there are half unpacked boxes all over my bed and I need to sort them out not only so that I can climb under the covers but so I can feel that I have crammed that little bit more into my weekend.

From a less self-critical angle, I do wonder if my feeling of underachievement is partly because I feel like I haven't really left the house. I walked to the bus-stop to meet my friend on Saturday, but that was only a few minutes away from the house. And when we went for a walk through the woods to the plant nursery, the end of my street backs on to some steps that open out onto Woodhouse Ridge so we were able to walk seamlessly from my street to the nursery without ever stepping outside of the woods.

As me and my ex boyfriend used to be fond of saying about our troubles, "of course - these aren't real problems, these are Guardian reader's problems". (A turn of phrase that came about after I read increasingly ridiculous questions week after week in the Saturday supplement in a section that allows readers to present problems such as "I have a candlewax figurine that has a film of dust and dirt on it. How best to clean it?" and actually get a serious answer. That is just an example from the most recent paper, there have been far, far worse ones in only the last six months.)

I may or may not have achieved enough this weekend. In the grand scheme of things however, I guess there are more important things to be worrying about.

"Moving furniture around"

I have been moving furniture around my living room, trying to work out the best arrangement in terms of aesthetics and practical use of space. Swapped the sofas round, decided they looked better before, so swapped them back again. Decided the two (full) bookcases in the alcoves either side of the fireplace would look better pushed up against the chimney breast rather than where they had been against the far walls, so had to empty those, move them, then restack the shelves. The room is now starting to look pretty good.

The only thing that is disturbing me is that as I think to myself "I am moving furniture around" I simultaneously remember an anecdote someone once told me about how when they were a child, their parents would sometimes shut themselves in their bedroom and explain any noises the child later questioned them on by saying that they were "moving furniture around".

Yet another innocent phrase that I can't think about in the same way anymore.

What shall we drink to?

My previously mentioned plans to set up my own "wine cellar" have finally come together!

The bottles between the two red crates at the bottom are shop bought wine that I've acquired from various sources, one bottle was a present from some guy after I did some work on his house during my handyperson stint and the other two are from when I've done the "M&S dine in for £10" deal which you get a bottle of wine with. I haven't paid for wine in a long time, not since I was trying to impress a girl who asked me round for dinner and asked me to bring a bottle of wine "but not that homemade stuff". What I should have said is "If you want me, and you want me to bring wine, you can have a bottle of the wine I make with love and enthusiasm. Now please give me my heart back." With the exception of those three bottles, all the wine in my cellar in homemade.

The bottom four shelves of wine are for special occasions, as ever since I started making wine I've always tried to keep a bottle from each batch back. I don't want to get *too* precious about it, and I have drunk bottles from this category in the past to celebrate events. The first bottle in my collection is an elderflower made in Summer 2008. Two years of wine making!

After that, I have sorted the everyday wine into the following three categories:

• Wine made from flowers (red clover blossom, rose petal and elderflower)
• Wine made from fruit (date, strawberry jam, tangerine and raisin, peach-pear-and-pineapple, banana, plum mead, pear mead, elderberry)
• Wine made from tea (lapsang souchong, single estate ceylon infused with lemon, earl grey, peppermint)   

I'm enjoying some peach, pear and pinapple wine this evening. When I first tried it in last september as it came out the demi-john I was really disappointed, but it's definitely improved. And keeping it in the cellar means it's still nicely chilled without having to put it in the fridge.

I am completely over-excited at the thought of having people round to dinner and being able to go down into the cellar to choose the right bottle of wine to go with the meal. Hell, I'm even excited about scavenging more planks of wood and bricks to build more shelves to accomodate the wine I'm gonna make this year! I think it would be fair to say that I am very excited about the whole homemade wine situation in general.

Two steep streets, two sets of steps and two staircases up to my bed

Allowing myself one last look over my shoulder, this is the cherry blossom tree in the front garden of my old house. I collected enough blossom to make two gallons of wine, which is fermenting in a bucket in my new house.
It was a long, tiring weekend of moving that started first thing on Saturday and ended about 8pm on Sunday, but I had my sister and two of my best friends helping me move each and every item. I am now safely installed in my new home, on a surprisingly comfy sofa, with my cat purring away next to me. I made it.

To get to our new house, you have to climb up two of the steepest streets I have come across in Leeds (and that's not me exaggerating for dramatic effect), then from our street into our garden there are a couple of steps, and then at the end of the path two more steps up for good measure, before you are finally at the front door. And then my bedroom is in the attic. Both flights of stairs up there are pretty steep too...

I have done this journey with all my possessions by car and van, and after that I have pushed my bike up carrying groceries, and in today's case, a vacuum cleaner strapped to the pannier rack. I just hope my legs get strong soon, I'm still finding it pretty tiring.

I haven't finished unpacking yet, and the kitchen is full of crates of homemade wine stacked up all over the place so I have been eating a lot of pasta, as this requires minimal cooking preparation. I'm hoping to carry all the wine down to the cellar over the weekend and set up some makeshift shelves out of bricks and planks, not least so I can start cooking meals involving vegetables and more that one pan, which is all I have access to at the moment.

But I love the house. I love the wooden floors, and the alcoves for my bookcases, and the fact that I live in the attic bedroom, and the fact that we can have our own wine cellar. I love having a window in the bathroom, and a gas cooker in the kitchen. I love having a mantelpiece to put my toy canal boat on. I love being so close to woodhouse ridge that I can take an alternative route home through the trees without making a detour.

I think I'm going to be very happy here.

My favourite book(case)

This evening, I finally packed away this bookcase full of books into seven boxes, one for each shelf.

I reorganised my books into colour order a few months back, after struggling for years to find an organisational system that satisfied me. Alphabetical by author was too simplistic, and grouping by subject matter (feminist theory, fairytales, craft etc) was fine until I found something that didn't fit neatly into any of them, or straddled several subjects. I tried organising the short stories, fiction and non-fiction separately, but then what of writers who have written books that fit in each category? I didn't like the way that a writer who wrote mostly novels would suddenly have one of their books stranded several shelves away, when I had previously grouped them all together.

In the end, I decided to order my main bookcase by colour. All my previous attempts at classification have been abandoned and it's actually quite liberating. Fiction and non fiction nestle up together, united by the fact that they both have a cornflower blue spine. The only problem I have had is that if I can't remember what colour spine a book has, it takes me a little longer to find it than if I had ordered them more conventionally. But ordering my books in this way has made me look on them with fresh eyes, as I search for a particular title I come across other books to read that I might have looked over before when they were grouped by author, or genre.

(I do also have a smaller bookcase that contains a lot of books with either black, white or multicoloured spines - the ones that didn't lend themselves to this system!)

One of my favourite books about books, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, has an essay in which a house is rented to an interior designer for a few months, and on their return the owner finds he has completely re-ordered their books by colour. They are upset that their organisational system has been disrupted, that precious books have been reduced to mere blocks of colour.

Perhaps if I had previously struck upon an organisational system that made complete sense in terms of author, subject matter, style and genre then I wouldn't want to let it go (or have it taken away from me!) but as it is, I've always loved arranging things in colour order, and I've always loved books, so for me this is perfect.

(I've left the image size large so that when you click on it, you can see the image up close and see the spines of the books and read the titles, if you want. I'm always checking out other people's bookcases, although I believe looking at your bookcases will tell me what books you have, not what sort of person you are.)

Why I *still* worry about showing my body hair

I think about my own body hair a lot. In fact, it's one of those things where if I were to take all the time and energy I spent thinking about it, and save it up, I could do something pretty awesome and incredible. But instead I spend that time and energy thinking about what other people might think. (I'm working on that.)

I don't currently shave my legs or my armpits. I haven't done since about November, which was when my last disposable razor became blunt. Before that, I shaved intermittently, depending on my relationship status, the weather, and if I was going swimming much.
It's something I've been thinking about more lately, as it's getting to be the time of year when, if it's there, body hair will be on display. I've already braved hairy armpits in both social and work contexts with no comment, but hairy legs sticking out the edge of rolled up jeans have prompted comments ranging from piss-taking (being told by a man that they are almost as hairy as his) to surprise and disgust (being told, by an acquaintance who I do youth work with, that they were gross. I think she was more shocked than genuinely disgusted. Although none of the young people commented on the hair, which I was pleasantly surprised by.)

My last significant other made a point of saying that he didn't have an issue with my body hair, which I think is pretty sound. I felt comfortable having hairy legs and armpits around him, because it just wasn't an issue. Which it shouldn't be, to be honest.

But the person I was with before then didn't make me quite as comfortable. She didn't actively comment on my body hair, but she would frequently say (in all seriousness) "oh, I haven't shaved my legs, I'm sorry, they're disgusting..." to which I would always reply that they were fine, and really not disgusting. Her hair was a lot fairer than mine, so any growth was barely noticable, but that really wasn't the issue, I wouldn't have been bothered if she did have visible body hair! But her comments hardly made me feel that my body hair was something she would be accepting of, given the disgust she had for it on her own body.

I'm not currently in a relationship, so any decision I now make about my body hair doesn't take into account a girlfriend or boyfriend's preference or opinion. All I have to think about now is what I want. Well, what I want and also how much hassle I want to put up with when I go out in public.

I wish that I could go to work in a skirt without tights, without risking colleagues looking at my legs distastefully. I feel uncomfortable enough going swimming, without attracting scornful glances for not having shaved off any hair that might cause offense. I get enough street harassment for cycling through the city centre, without people being able to see when I stop at the traffic lights that my legs are hairy...

But then I admit, I don't know how colleagues would respond to my bare hairy legs, because I've never tried it. Each time it gets to be warm enough to wear a skirt without tights, I cave in and shave them. And then I keep shaving them. Until it's no longer leg-baring weather. We have a reasonably relaxed dress code in my office, but the only hair I have ever seen is above the shoulders. I can dress as smartly as I like, but if I walked into a meeting with hairy legs I would feel less confident than if they were either shaved or covered up. Maybe I'm worrying too much? Maybe a lot of people just won't care. But the people who have commented in the past, perhaps unthinkingly, made me feel incredibly self-conscious.

My hair is naturally dark and reasonably thick. If I have bare legs, you can see the hair on them. I'm slightly envious of female friends of mine with fairer body hair, who don't shave but also pass more easily in the world of smooth-legged women. Sometimes I get exasperated at myself for spending so much time thinking about society's response to my body hair, because I should be thinking about much more important things. But then I remember that it's ok to get upset about the small things too. And street harassment on the basis of my physical appearance is indicative of the wider problem that women's bodies are considered public domain.

Then this campaign caught my eye: Hairy Awarey Campaign. Running from 1st June - 31st July, it encourages women to grow and show their body hair during this period. The rationale is that many women remove or hide their body hair because of fears of a negative response from society, but if women all began showing their hair, then the taboo could be lifted. I've seen this work on a smaller scale - a lot of my ace feminist friends don't shave and that means that when we're out together, I don't feel self conscious about my body hair because I'm not the only one. To have that feeling of security on a larger scale would be incredible, and I like the idea enough to join the campaign. I had been thinking about shaving my legs and armpits this spring/summer, for an easier life, but I'm going to try and hold off. Sometimes just knowing that I have the support of other women is enough to make me feel strong.