The bookshelf

The online photo archive, Flickr, is awash with people who colour code their books. They had, she noted, given them cheerful, jubilant  titles such as 'cornucopia of books' or 'rainbow books.' In a way, it appealed, so she had a go at doing the same. Thus orange began making towers of Penguin texts. And then - serendipitous!- she saw that the Wisden Cricketers' Almanacks were already done. With a frisson of excitement, she turned to other colours.  Hmmm: a subtle change: how might one grade and sequence pink and purple books? Let's have a look. So, we ended up with William Faulkner next to a googly-eyed children's book on strange birds (actually: now I look at this shelf in the picture - I am charmed by the diversity of the stuff in our house - author) and texts by Sylvia Plath and William Empson. She felt niggled, though. The shelves and their arrangement did not have the neat appeal of the rainbow books on the Flickr gallery. But plough on.

Black books. Penguin Classics, naturally.A few others would fit in here. Malory's Morte D'Arthur next to the late Benazir Bhutto's first autobiography, Daughter of the East. But she was running out of time and put the rest off until tomorrow. Twenty shelves were done. Productive work.

Later that day, Susie happened to come into the study.

"That thing with the books. We'll have to get you out of that", she said. Not, then, "What lovely colours!" Susie sniggered quietly and left the room.

But our book shuffler felt on top of things; controlled; co-ordinated - despite nothing being quite as neat as the blueprints offered by the internet rainbow artists.

Her husband came home; he looked but said nothing. He looked again. And said nothing very loudly.

And the following day, there it was. A dark purple book in the midst of a sort of sea colour melange (because, as she went on, the urge to think in areas of the colour spectrum rather than pure tones became more compelling). She had not put it there, a book by the Southern author Robert Penn Warren, against a diary and a book on Methodism; cocking a snook, she thought, at the green of Lord of the Rings. It went on.

He said "I cannot ******* find anything."

She stood back. It was true. And a lesson was learned. If you have a lot of books, adopting this approach is not befitting. It's also not, as a general rule, clever, funny or remotely sexy. With apologies to the keepers of the rainbow books, it is not for her - however much she might like it to be so.