The Purging of the Pouch

Hello there. You catch me in a light mood today, as I've just had a bit of a purge. A jolly good clear out. Nothing like flushing the old system out to put a bounce in your step. Even as I type, I am glancing down with pride at the large pile spread out at my feet. Ahhh.

I don’t mean that, you filthworm. I mean I've been decluttering the place.

With Herself’s imminent return from the Western Marches after 18 long months providing musculo-skeletal care to the good folk of the principality next door, the Ocelot’s Lair is in need of a little pre-emptive space-making. It’s going to be like moving in together all over again, with all the attendant fun of arguing about how many spare duvet covers we need and who has the best kettle. Thus to avert any unclassy domestic issues before they arise, we have both resolved to junk our junk now and so aid the smooth reintegration of our two households, alike in tat and stuff.

Herself has already set the bar high, with an impressive pile of old clothes and CSI DVDs for the chucking out. Can you imagine, in these days of Sky Living and Channel 5 and TiVoPlayer+ boxes, a time when anyone needed to see CSI that badly that they went out and got them on DVD? Believe me, younger readers, those innocent times did exist.

Anyhoo, encouraged by her wardrobey sacrifices and expunging of Grissom et al of the Las Vegas crime lab, I too have bent myself to the task of purging the place of stuff I can do without. This is no simple task for me, as I am one of life’s hoarders. Not an extreme hoarder you understand; you won’t have to shove the front door open and sidle past towering piles of old newspapers in my stinking cat-infested suburban semi, but I do find it hard to throw things out. Especially books and films and stuff like that. My bookshelves are like personal showcases, like my life’s CV rendered in flat-packed wood. Someone can come in, mooch on over to the row of ceiling-high Billys, cock their head on one side and check out the spines of my book collection. I do much the same at other people’s houses. In residences where there are no books, I find myself at a loss and increasingly panicky.

I have little problem ridding myself of non-readable/viewable tat though; darling little ceramic things that older relatives of a certain age tend to give me for Christmas, the collection of stuffed sheep I have been inexplicably presented with over the years, the half dozen glass vases that came with various Interflora deliveries. The nice people of the local charity shops will be taking receipt of them in short order, I can tell you. I guess it just depends on what you’re into, what you like and what you want to surround yourself with.

For myself, I could never part with my tattered paperback of Brian Hildreth’s How To Survive, nor the Usborne bumper hardback of Monsters, Ghost and UFOs. I can never quite convince myself that I will never need to read those books again, nor want to watch some old comedy series one more time. So hopefully you’ll understand how difficult it is for me to part with any of this sort of stuff. It’s especially hard if it was a special present from someone. I have a copy of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad given to me by my dad many years ago. He’s written something nice inside, so even though I was a bit too young and never got more than a couple of chapters in (it’s one of the three books I've never finished along with The Lord of the Rings and Three Men on the Bummel), there’s no way I can dispose of it, because it meant so much to the person that gave it to me. In fact I'm beginning to suspect that subconsciously I'm writing this entire piece purely so my dad can read it and lift the obligation upon me to read the damn thing, like some kind of papal pardon.

The three great topics in the modern school curriculum

Contains actual diagrams about gutting and preparing deer

Still and all, space must be made afore the triumphant of Herself to the Shire of Opportunity, so I have just jolly well knuckled down for the last few hours and chucked some stuff out.

Almost.

Well, it’s in piles all around me and hanging from doors, ready for the chucking out. Or giving away to friends. Or ebaying. In some cases I may present the local library with selected items of my superfluous reading material so that in the years to come, like giving away a loved but overly demanding dog to a friend, I can visit them now and again.

Here then is a run-down of stuff that is on the out-pile, followed by fascinating snippets of what each item means to me. It’s going to be like a mass psychometry session, or a time-filling series on Radio 4. Should you feel the urge to take any of it out of my hands, and can promise it will go to a good home, do get in contact.

* * *

The original Star Wars trilogy on VHS ‘in wide screen’. Yes, VHS. Brace yourselves, for there will be more video tape to come. This trilogy was given to me by a workmate many years ago. If I remember rightly, he was (and possibly still is) as much if not more of a hoarder than I. He obsessively collected videos of certain genres, or with certain stars. Somewhere in the Ocelot’s Lair I still have the exercise book he once gave me, filled with delicate entries on every line of every video he possessed, so that I could request to borrow anything I fancied, like an early version of LoveFilm. I seem to remember that he was a fan of certain actors and would track down everything they had ever appeared. Thus he was one of the few people to own a copy of Grease 2, starring the young Michelle Pfeiffer (and Maxwell Caulfield off The Colbys).

Grease 2 was originally a live-action Gelfling adventure 

Silverado. VHS. I'm not sure why I have a copy of this. Possibly I got hold of it as background research for a Wild West freeform (dressy up and pretend) game I played some years ago. Not a massive fan of Silverado. It’s got lots of unshaven guys in long coats riding around a lot as I recall. Plus John Cleese as an unlikely sheriff. For what it’s worth, my character in the freeform was based on Danny Glover in the film. Yes, I know.

Sleepy Hollow. VHS. The one with Depp and all the British character actors. Perfectly good Tim Burton film. It’s just that I've seen it a bunch of times and don’t need to actually own it. In retrospect it always bugs me that the Johnny Rico guy gets killed in this (sorry, spoiler alert) since he puts up a good fight against the headless horseman. Also, whatserface from The Addams Family is in this, all growed up (kinda) with blonde hair and the most incongruous ‘child’s head on a woman’s body’ I’d seen until Lily Cole came along. She looks like a Cluedo piece.

Her from Sleepy Hollow

Hammer House of Horror. VHS. This is the 1980 TV series, an anthology show along the lines of Tales of the Unexpected and well, Hammer horror films. Lower budget than the movies, but still boasting an impressive British cast like Denholm Elliott, Peter Cushing, Diana Dors and so on in thirteen 50-minute chunks. Nothing wrong with this, but I just don’t have the space.

The Ultimate Ball Juggling Video. VHS (unsurprisingly). I think my parents got me this after we saw a juggler at some living history place. He was probably dressed in motley doing a bit of shtick in the grounds of a stately home. Or maybe he was just busking at Covent Garden. My memory betrays me. At any rate, I was taken with learning to juggle, and with the aid of this video, 6 weeks of almost breaking every window at the back of the house, and a lot of dropped tennis balls, I got the hang of it. Never managed four balls though, or any of the tricky reverse cascade stuff (or was that a dangerous space manoeuvre in Star Trek: The Next Generation?). But I am still indebted to Max Oddball and Sean Gandini for their wise tutelage, though they know it not. This and my ability to come up with punning shop names are what will stand me in good stead come the inevitable collapse of civilisation.

An actual shop selling actual juggly things

Home taped stuff. My God, the stuff we used to tape. All of us used to, didn't we? Only I've never got round to chucking it out, unlike the rest of you with your iTabs and Skype+ boxes and what have you. Remember what it was like when there wasn't any TV on demand? No YouTube, no DVD boxsets? Sure, there was video - VHS and Betamax - but the chances of anyone actually selling tapes of your favourite programme that went out on BBC2 at 6pm every Thursday or ITV at 11pm every Friday were remote. And if you didn't watch it on that day at that time, that was it buddy. No +1 channel, no catch up TV, no naughty downloads. You miss it, for whatever reason, and you just don’t get to see it. 

Thanks to a particularly ill-timed family wedding one Saturday in the 1980s, it would be years before my brother and I would finally see the Robin of Sherwood episode Herne’s Son (part one). I think. Though it may have been Dick Turpin or the all-but forgotten Oliver Tobias vehicle Smuggler. I'm definitely losing neurons by the cupful here.

Dick Turpin about the house and sidekick Swiftnick

My particular treasure trove of home taped telly includes: The Simpsons (can you believe that there was a time when it wasn't on Sky bloody One all the bloody time?), Red Dwarf series one to seven (God, I used to love Red Dwarf. Then Back To Earth cured me of all that) and random episodes of Frazier, Buffy, Smack the Pony and Chris Morris’ out-there comedy Jam.

Jam: Mr Lizard

What I'm not chucking out (and praying that the tapes still play in my antiquated VHS machine) are my lovingly recorded runs of Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, from a time when they were shown on BBC2 back-to-back in the 90s. Happy days. Not the show Happy Days, the BBC2 Sanders-Seinfeld thing. As well you know.

I’m also hanging on to a few select commercial VHS tapes from beloved old series, even though I could probably go out and get them on DVD or just run them on YouTube if I were so minded: the tragic, shocking climax of the BOB plotline in Twin Peaks, and the first few episode of classic Star Trek (including The Cage pilot episode, The Corbomite Maneuver featuring scary old Balok, and Where No Man Has Gone Before, when Kirk’s mate becomes the Beyonder or something).

Balok. Still scary after all these years

I think I was taping a lot of these shows not just for myself, but in the secret belief that at some point in the future they would be needed by the nation. You know, in case all other copies of the programmes were wiped or there was a fire at the BBC or something. Then I would be like one of those guys who audio-taped old Doctor Who episodes back in the 60s and 70s who were now being hailed as far-seeing saviours of our collective cultural heritage. Thus far, I have not been approached by the British Film Institute for my valuable collection of early Simpsons. Amazingly.

I did do nice yellow drawings of Bart and Lisa on the sides of the tapes though.

* * *

OK, so much for the videos, now for the books. Didn't really want to chuck any of these out. I mean it’s not like they’re going to stop working, unlike the VHS tapes. And yeah, I suppose I could just try to get some of these on one of your new-fangled Kimballs or whatever, but I really need to alleviate the bookcases of around two feet’s worth of extraneous reading material that I've been shoving in here and there in a most unattractive fashion, like an eccentric television academic or idiosyncratic detective (both of which I admit are firm role models).

Most if not all of these are in fair decent nick. I tend only to read things once, and since I no longer do the train thing into work and back every day, my books are less likely to look like they've been kicked down the school corridor by the class bully several times.

Charlie Brooker’s Dawn of the Dumb, and The Hell of It All. Writings and news columns from the excellent Mr Brooker, whose various TV commentary shows I have loved (though not the ill-considered panel show You Have Been Watching). My inspiration when it comes to spleen venting of all kinds.

Christopher Lee’s Tall Dark and Gruesome. An autobiography. I do admire Mr Lee’s body of work, but autobiographies really aren't my thing. Unless they’re funny and made up (see Les Patterson’s The Traveller’s Tool).

I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. Rigorously faithful mock-autobiog of Steve Coogan’s monstrous TV alter-ego (or one of them at least. I rather liked his showcase series Coogan’s Run, much in the vein of the earlier Seven of One from Ronnie Barker. But I digress). Entertaining, but only needs to be read the once.

Russell Kane’s The Humorist. One of many dark stories written by comedians that I've read over the years (Charlie Higson, Hugh Laurie, Adrian Edmondson even). Not bad stuff, but pretty dark, as I say. On the plus side, it weaves Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Graham Chapman into a plot involving the deadly power of comedy. He probably wanted to call it The Killing Joke, but that title’s already been used.

"Nein, sagt er..."

Grant Morrison’s Supergods. A cross between a history and an autobiography, this starts off describing the rise of the superhero archetype in American comics, then covers the Scottish writer’s own rise to comic stardom, whilst periodically going off on one about magic and the nature of reality, this being Grant Morrison after all.

John Scalzi’s Redshirts. Entertaining fiction about a group of folks who slowly come to realise that they’re expendable extras in an ongoing sci-fi story. Works well right up to the point that they start time-travelling and going to back to the modern day to meet TV producers, at which point it’s no longer the fun Trek-spoof it started off as. Padded with short stories about secondary characters for the final quarter of the book, possibly to bring it up to some notional minimal word count.

Jack McGee’s Rapscallion. Basically this is Sharpe’s Bow Street Runners. Entertaining historical action. Two of the other books in the series, Ratcatcher and Resurrectionist, dip their toes in the Jules Verne and Gothic genres.

John O’Farrell’s An Utterly Impartial History of Britain. An entertaining enough read (but rather thick) paperback covering 2000 years of British history from the former comedy scriptwriter. Trouble is, I do find myself having to wade through this sort of factual book, rather than lapping it up. Give me a children’s Dorling Kindersley book about the same thing any day, with colourful maps and bite-size factlets dotted about. Or a documentary on telly with moving pictures and stuff. Or even better, Horrible Histories, the greatest educational kids show for adults.

It doesn't matter if you don't have children. Just watch it.

Ed Glinert’s The London Compendium: a street by street exploration of the hidden metropolis. Just one of several ‘hidden cool stuff in London’ books I have or have had. I'm wading through another just now, by Peter Ackroyd. But see the above comments about my inability to absorb factual books (you should have seen me struggling through a whopper on Stalingrad, or one about Thermopylae). By rights, I should have absorbed enough Londonian trivia by now to qualify as a blue badge guide or to knock out a psychogeographical mystery worthy of Christopher Fowler or David Aaronovitch. Instead I struggle to recall the names of the city’s great necropolises and lost tube stations and if Bazalgette built the sewers or hunted the Ripper. But hey, that’s what the internet’s for, right?

Brian Cronin’ Was Superman A Spy? One of many books containing interesting background trivia on American comics. In fact I've just finished reading Cronin’s Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent as well. “You’re throwing out comic book trivia, Ocelot? But surely this is your most favouritest thing ever! Are you unwell?” True, my little Pouch Potato, true, I am indeed loathe to part. Fascinating titbits about the Black Panther and the Howling Commandos are very much my thing, indeed they would certainly form one of my chosen specialist subjects if I were ever brave enough to go on Mastermind (I'm not). But space, our old enemy, is against us here.

Frank Plowright’s Comics Guide. From 1997. One of those price guide things that true investors would have to buy every year to keep up to date. I'm a collector, but not a seller, so I only really bought it for the handy summaries of each comic series listed. In this day and age of wikimatic information, it’s not so important. It does have quite a nice cover from the excellently pseudonymous Frank Quitely though, and because all the characters have their backs to us, we don’t have to see the weird way he draws mouths.

Is it me or does Frank Quitely's Superman look like Terry Christian?

Gary Larson’s Unnatural Selections and Cows of Our Planet. Far Side cartoons, which I love. See also Calvin & Hobbes and Dilbert. Do people still make these sorts of books? Do other people still buy them in this era of hilarious cat videos posted to out Facebook timelines?

John Gray’s Mars / Venus book. Simplistic and prone to stereotyping, but it has proved useful to me over the years, though I cherry picked behaviours from both side of the fence, natch (like when to go into the man–cave).

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Making Comics. Two clever, weighty examinations of what comic books are all about, Read ‘em a couple of times. Maybe a bit too clever for me, or maybe I just didn't need to know about all the method and philosophy stuff. A bit like when I went to evening classes about appreciation cinema – I started to switch off when the teacher got going about milieus and two-shots. There’s a good diagram on pages 52 & 53 of the first book.

Understanding Comics

Gotham by Gaslight. The first (I think) ‘elseworlds’ comics from DC. Batman vs Jack the Ripper in turn of the century Gotham! Decent enough idea. The artwork by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola hasn't dated well though, but it could mainly be the late 80s colouring process which makes many of the characters look jaundiced.

52, volumes one to four. These are collections of DC comics from a few years ago, just after one of their periodic Crisis events. Not sure why I bought volume one, though the reason for buying the remaining three volumes was simply that I already had volume one. I am sucker for a complete set, and thus the comic publisher’s target audience in many ways. It’s a bit sprawling, covering dozens of characters over a fictional year in the DC universe. Check out the cool double page spread of Rip Hunter’s time lab in volume one, pages 138 & 139. Partially written by mad Grant Morrison.

52: Rip Hunter's cool time lab

Ruth Brown’s The Story of Greyfriars Bobby. Some of you who have read the Chocolate Ocelot’s Fringe may be aware of my reverence for the noble mutt, who has been immortalised as a statue in the centre of Edinburgh. This slim, ridiculously slim actually, hardback book is aimed at children and maudlin adults such as myself, so that they may periodically torture themselves with the sad tale of the dog that sat by his master’s graveside. Herself probably bought this for me to mock my love of this ‘stupid made-up publicity stunt’ (her heartless words).

Oh the nobility

Countdown Annual 1972. Bought from a charity shop for £3. British kids annual featuring Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and other TV shows. Smells a bit funny.  Includes actual science about the Apollo space programme, a badly drawn UFO strip, and a rubbish Who adventure featuring ambulatory master-plants. Smells a bit. Yes, I know I said that already, but it really smells.

Countdown. Very poor indeed

So there you have a list of the crap I'm throwing out. Let the bidding frenzy begin.

Anybody? Anybody? Tch.

The Chocolate Ocelot's Bookpile

Hello. It’s been ages, hasn’t it? You look great. Have you lost weight? And your hair - lovely! Do sit down. Have a cup of tea and a hobnob. No please, do. No? I’ll have yours then if you don’t mind. Mm, lovely. Anyway.

I was watching a thing on BBC4 recently. It was called, I think, Danny Baker Talks To Some Friends About Old Records, and was very worthy indeed. Everyone taking turns to talk about their first album or what their fave record shop was and so forth. All very nostalgic of a passing era and all that. And I enjoyed it well enough, but truth be told, I’m not much of a rock and popster. When conversations turn to what music folks listened to in their formative years, I tend to keep my head down and hope they don’t ask me. Unless I feel I’m particularly bold, in which case I tentatively own up to being a constituent member of that tiny slice of the population who used to record their favourite theme tunes off the telly. Oh yes, that was me. The funked-up 80’s Dr Who theme? Got it. The extended Airwolf outro? Got it. The Adventure Game theme featuring Acornsoft sound effects? I was all over it baby.

In other words, I was a very late comer to popular music indeed. Where others of my generation were absorbing Duran Duran’s Rio or enjoying the 12” of Depeche Mode’s Master and Servant (“It’s a lot, It’s a lot” and repeat) , I was listening to selected comedy sketches off the double album of We Are Most Amused and memorising every line of Balham, Gateway To The South. Ah, the comfort of a well-crafted skit.

As with so many aspects of life, I was a late adopter of pop and rock and their ilk. I was even a late adopter of the term ‘late adopter’, which shows how hardcore I am when it comes to lagging some way behind the zeitgeist. If the zeitgeist comes close enough for me to make out the back of its metaphorical head, I bend down and pretend to do my shoes up until it’s moved comfortingly off into the distance once more. Not only am I a late adopter, I’m a curmudgeonly one, a begrudging one. And not even an adopter, which suggests some sort of acquiescence to the new (often middle-aged concept) in question. I’m more like a host organism having something foisted on it, possibly by ingesting something frightful and foreign. Like a hapless impregnated colonial marine in Aliens.

But, characteristically, I digress.

Here’s the thing about that Danny Baker music programme. They were all talking about how what albums they bought and listened to, and how what records you have on your shelf defines who you are …

(Actually, come to think of it, that last bit may have been an entirely different BBC4 programme about albums. There’s a bunch of them at the moment, like last year’s spate of high-cheekboned shiny-lipped Brian no-not-the-actor Cox science shows. How many programmes are there about albums at the moment? Is it the album Olympics or something?)

… and I’m sitting there watching it, trying to pretend I’m the sort of person who bought Rumours and Diamond Dogs and Nevermind, instead of We Are Most Amused and the Flash Gordon soundtrack and the Barron Knights’ A Taste Of Aggro, and it came to me that it’s not my albums but my bookshelf that says something about who I am (in a contrived made up for a blog sort of way).

Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. It’s really my towering Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark-Warehouse stacks of comic boxes that say the most about me, I think but that’s a soul-baring insight for another time. For now, let us pretend that my first love is books, and proceed from there.

Here are the books that I have either just read in the last month or so, or are languishing in a composting pile by my bed, awaiting their turn to be read. This list is not only an insight into my reading tastes, but also into the tastes of people who lend me books, thinking I might like to read them. It is also a way of saying ‘Please God don’t anyone buy or lend me any more books for the rest of the year. Not even for next Christmas’. I know, serious or what.

So, let us proceed unto the beddal chamber (when I say we, I mean me. You stay right there, you saucy scamp) and return with my stack of books, thence to enwisen (new word) you with the great and varied panoply of my reading habits. We’ll start at the top of the pile, ostensibly the ones I’m going to read next, or possibly the ones that have most recently landed there. I know, not much of a system , but hey.

Can I just say ‘Ow, my back’ at this point? Nobody should attempt to pick up that many books in one go at my age. Important health & safety warning there for you, and probably a good argument for kindles and their kind, though not for me obviously (see ‘late adopter’ above).

Firstly, assume that the top few inches of the pile are inhabited by a liberal coating of comics from the local library or comic shop (yes, we have a comic shop in our county! It’s like the 90s boom all over again, tch…). These will have been gifted unto me, on a short-term basis, by my good friend and comic wrangler known to some of you as the Lion of Burcombe and others as Dr Foot, for reasons too geeky and obscure to go into here. Between us we account for the majority of the graphic novel lendage across all public libraries in a ten mile radius. God knows what we’re doing to their customer usage stats, but I suspect we’re both on some kind of register by now. We will gloss over this layer for today, safely assuming that Comics Always Get Read First, because I loves them so.

1. Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge. Lent to me by a friend and thus one that I felt I ought to read as quickly as poss and then return before I lose it / bury it under all the other books / simply wreck its pristine spine and clean pages with my horrid paper-destroying paws (how do other people manage to read books without appearing to have even opened them at any point? Do they use special tools and tiny mirrors on sticks, like bomb disposal experts? I truly believe that people who lend you seemingly unspoilt books are doing it on purpose to shame you when you return it, red-faced and mumbling, in a spine-wrinkled, dog-eared state. It is, to quote a well-known admiral, a trap.) I rather liked this book, though the cover and main character have led me to suspect that it is aimed at younger, possibly brighter, readers than me. But I did eventually get into it. And it is printed in a fetching font. Or possibly typeface. Is there a difference? Printy people, feel free to educate me.

2. Is It Just Me?, by Miranda Hart. Christmas present. Very jolly, though it is a hardback, so tricky to slip into my bag when I’m out and about and in need of a book-like aid when sat in cafes on my lonesome. Yes, I probably should have a copy of Heat or Grazia instead, or sit there furiously scrolling through my non-existent iPhone, or just staring vacantly into space. Anyway, good old Miranda. It reads very much as she talks on her show, and a very infectious style of writing it is too, as this very article may attest, though the lingering after-effects of me having watched Charlie Brooker a couple of days ago may also be leaking through. I am nothing if not an unoriginal style-sponge.

3. Knightmare: Can You Beat The Challenge?, by Tim Child and Dave Morris. Lent by Mr J Twine of Sandybeds. What do you mean you don’t know this book? Knightmare? Children’s ITV, late 80s teatime? Treguard? Dire warning team? Spellcasting D I S M I S S? Oh, you young flibberts. I feel so old. This is the book of the kids’ puzzle/adventure show of the same name. A bit like Trapped or Raven these days, if I’ve surreptitiously surfed CBBC of a morning correctly. The first two thirds of this splendidly yellowing paperback make up a rather serious tale of the young hero Treguard battling across Norman England to reclaim his castle, taking on nasty fen-dragons and black knights. It’s actually not bad, considering it was probably knocked out as a quick cash-in. The last third of the book is a Fighting-Fantasy style choose your own adventure, which I have not as yet had the time to essay, but I look forward to riddling my way past stony-faced wall elemental Granitas (of legend).

4. A weekend magazine about films. Courtesy of my mum, who likes saving me things from the papers that I might like to read. I never quite find the time to read them properly, but do try to flick through a bit, absorb a couple of facts from the main articles and then return it to her with thanks, thus unwittingly encouraging her to lend me more such periodicals in the future. If you are my mum reading this, ignore the previous bit – I do read them all thoroughly, thank you very much. Actually, this has turned out to be a good way for my mum and I to bond, mainly through a shared appreciation of certain weekend magazine columnists, though I’m not sure if she loves Caitlin Moran and her lovely mad huge hair as much as I do.

5. Warcraft: The Day Of The Dragon, by Richard A Knaak (probably an orcish name). Lent by Herself, who is going through something of a ‘read every single Warcraft tie-in book’ at the moment. As a fellow Warcrafter (WoWer? Sad geek?) I am of course a prime target for receiving this sort of book, but they’re not all written terribly well, so this one is languishing in the pile somewhat. I have managed three or four Warcraft books so far, sympathising with the poor authors like Christie Golden who have to work out the tortuously convoluted timelines of this ever-changing game world. Still, at least they’re not trying to make sense of several decades of Marvel or DC comic continuity.

6. The Humorist, by Russell Kane. Christmas present. He’s the one that did Britney Spears for Comic Relief, right? Or is he the one that does that Good News comedy show on BBC3 with the awkward unfunny segment about someone nice at the end? I’m not sure. Either way, I’m sure Russell is British, so why he spells Humorist like that I don’t know. Perhaps the main character is American. As soon as I get down to reading it, I’m sure I’ll know.

7. Bond Girls: The Good, The Bad, The Dangerous, by Alastair Dougall. Christmas present, I think. It does get a bit blurry sometimes, especially if someone happens to lend you a book around December time. I could end up keeping it for years before they eventually tell me, somewhat embarrassed, that it was a just for lenders. This is one of those pictorial reference books that I do tend to accumulate, though usually about Doctor Who monsters or the history of the X-Men. The cover feels funny, slightly rough, like a pumice stone or (shudder) the plastic bag of tiles from a Travel Scrabble set.

8. World Of Warcraft: The Shattering (Prelude To The Cataclysm), by Christie Golden. Lent by Herself. Well you can’t fault the gravitas (as opposed to Granitas of legend) of its title. I’ve tried on three occasions to get through this tale of orcs and trolls and minotaurs – sorry, taurens – but it’s just not grabbing me. This it has slipped halfway down the pile, despite its fetching cover of a whacking great warhammer hitting the ground. I wonder if Christie Golden is one of those authors that lives with cats? The bio at the back doesn’t say, but she looks like the type.

9. Blacksad: De Hel, De Stilte (A Silent Hell), by Diaz Canales and Guarnido. What is this, I hear you ask? Why, the adventures of John Blacksad, a hard-bitten Californian detective in the 50s or course. Except that Blacksad is an anthropomorphic cat, and everyone else in the story is an animal too. No, come back, it’s really good. Look for one of the English versions in your library, like Somewhere Within The Shadows or Arctic Nation. This one’s in Dutch. No, I don’t speak or read Dutch, apart from Dank U and Alstublieft. But I was in a Belgian comic shop a couple of years ago, and got so excited to see a new Blacksad on the shelf that I momentarily glossed over the fact that I can’t read a word of it and snapped it up. As far as I can tell, the story’s got something to do with goats and voodoo in New Orleans. It sure does look pretty though.

10. Grand Anciens (The Great Old Ones): La Baleine Blanche (The White Whale), by Jean-Marc Laine and Bojan Vukic. Also bought by me during a madness-fuelled comic shopping trip in Belgium. This hardback graphic novel has a great painting of the titanic behemoth Cthulhu lurking just beneath the waves as a sailing ship (I have no idea what sort, it has lots of sails. Let’s just agree that it’s a clipper and move on) passes serenely overhead. Unlike the Dutch Blacksad, I do at least stand a chance of following the French in this tale, and indeed I have already - just two years later - managed to work out that it’s a mash-up of Herman Melville and HP Lovecraft , with Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab taking the Pequod out into the ocean in search of the aforementioned tentacular Great Old One. In an act of sheer folly, I decided I would actually sit down and translate this into English, for my non Francophone friends. So far I’m up to page 15 of 48, with the second book to follow that. Surprisingly, Google Translate is not as helpful with 19^th century French whaling terms as I had hoped.

11. Doctor Who: The Time Traveller’s Almanac: The Ultimate Intergalactic Fact-Finder, by Steve Tribe. One of those lovely-to-look-at tie-in books that Dorling Kindersley do so well, this one is of course a BBC publication, and jam packed with all sorts of Whoey facts and photos, like the names of all the Abzorbaloff’s victims (OK, not a good example), a feature on the Dalek Sec’s humanoid form (right, another bad example, hang on…) and a lovely shot of when the Doctor got all aged into Dobby from Harry Potter (I give up). No really, it is jolly well produced. But maybe it’s time to pass this one on to a deserving recipient, like the local library. I like to visit the library occasionally and check out my old books, now sporting swanky hard-wearing transparent covers and little ‘stampy lending sheets’ (I don’t know the proper term) inside. It’s like giving away a pet but still being able to visit.

12. Sew What! Bags: 18 Pattern-Free Projects You Can Customize To Fit Your Needs, by Lexie Barnes. A present from Herself, having listened to me bang on about how the Perfect Bag does not exist once too often. A lovely little hard-wearing ring bound number, much like a book of recipes, this book features such memorable sections as Reversible Tote, Ditty Bag and City Satchel. Such fun! (I told you I’d just read Miranda Hart). The idea was obviously that I would read this book, work out how to create my own Perfect Bag, and shut the hell up about not having enough inside pouches for my memory sticks and lip balms and keys. What actually happened was that I flicked through, got intimidated by the thought of having to actually make a bag with my own ape-like paws, and promptly hid it under the French and Dutch graphic novels in fear, hoping that maybe one night the elves will magically make the Perfect Bag for me. So far no joy. Doing And Making books are buggers really – you idly mention that it would be nice to, I dunno, draw better, and then out of the blue you receive a whacking great book on anatomy and probably a set of pencils and a pad of paper too, as if to say OK bitch, let’s see you put your money where your mouth is and get drawing. The pressure. It’s awful.

13. A dictionary of grammar, by some people. A tiny wee book I rescued from my mum’s chucking out pile, when I was half-serious about being a professional proof-reader or copyeditor. Then I read through it and remembered how god-awful bonkers the English language is and why couldn’t the Germans have at least invaded our dictionaries back in the war. Ostensibly I am the owner of a grammar book and thus supposedly qualified in all manner of apostrophes and adverbials, but in practice, reading a darn dictionary of linguistic rules is horribly like schoolwork, so I have instead determined to ensure that as long as I give off the impression of being better at written English than those that I carefully choose to swap words with, nobody will ever catch me out. Journalists, professional writers and adults educated over 40 years ago reading this may disagree.

14. Following The Detectives: Real Locations In Crime Fiction, by Maxim Jakubowski. A gift from the parents. Another one of those popular reference books I seem to have acquired, this one being a guide to actual cities and towns that fictional crime fighters frequent. So we have Morse’s Oxford, Rebus’ Edinburgh, Cadfael’s Shrewsbury and so forth, with handy maps, author biographies and such. All well and good, but the bloody book is massive, the very opposite of a guide book in fact. It should have come as a ring bound folder, to save me lugging the redundant 95% of it along with me on holiday as I traipse around VI Warshawski’s Chicago (lies, I haven’t been to Chicago) and Wallander’s Sweden( also lies). Consequently, it languishes near the very bottom of my bedside book pile, along with…

15. Obsessed With Marvel: Test Your Knowledge Of The Marvel Universe. 2,500 questions on the minutiae of Marvel comics from seventy years of publication. I picked this up for about a fiver at one of them cheapo bookshops you get in shopping centres, where everything’s piled up really close and you can’t get down the aisles because there’s a mum and a kid in a pushchair blocking the way leafing through an outsized book of Cheryl Cole photos. I then took it to show a similar comic-loving friend who promptly interpreted it as a gift and accepted it with gratitude. Ever the cool customer, I said nowt and just got myself another copy the next week, hoping that the mum and pushchair had eventually dislodged themselves.

So that’s it. My entire bedside bookpile. And this doesn’t even include the fresh intake I received at Christmas which haven’t made it into the bedroom yet. This new batch, still neatly arranged in what I call the Living Room Christmas Pile, includes a book about Alan Partridge (actually from the Christmas before, the shame), a book about secret London, a book about I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, a book about superheroes, an anthology by popular fantasy authors (for that oh-so hard to find Game Of Thrones short story), and a book about animals that received medals for bravery which is too sad for me to read (alas brave Simon, hero cat of HMS Amethyst).

All in all, quite enough to be getting on with for a year or two.

If you must comment on this article, please make it brief as I have several million words to get through before next year. Thanks awf.