I am hoping to move house any second. This is exciting. However, it won't be a gentle downsizing so much as a vertiginous drop into Lethe. And I have too many bloody books. So I've been sorting them into piles.

A good number I have been carting around since long-gone Leeds University days when I would return home in the summer and steal a few from the shelves of my parents' second-hand bookshop. Pointless titles like 'Italian Renaissance Sculpture' - a paperback the size of a studio flat in Kensington and the weight of a donkey.

There are 6 copies of Madame Bovary which I can't even recall getting to the end of, three of The Mill on the Floss - which I loved, until a girl who smoked a pipe at Leeds pointed out it was highly anti-women. There are Serbo-Croat dictionaries purloined from an ex-boyfriend, loads of Greek dictionaries and self-teach texts bought during a massive love-affair which ruined me in the 80s, huge tomes about Post-Impressionist painters, books about the Bloomsbury set, sex in politics, English Churches, Frank Capa and Martha Gellhorne and a big, cheerful coffee-table number called The Poster in History. The Times Atlas of the World would easily paper my sitting-room with pages to spare and there are scores of cookery books about meze, tapas, tagines, fondant icing, barbecuing outdoors, barbecuing indoors, how to make mini smokers from old sardine tins and soup cans, brewing wine from stuff in hedges, creating starter doughs and grilling on camp-fires. Not forgetting all sorts of instructional texts about crafting - lino cuts, driftwood trees, mastering charcoal, watercolour washes, felting, freehand embroidery - and quite a lot of self-flagellating holy stuff: Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and copies of the Catholic catechism with pages stuck together by snot and tears.  

These ridiculous books all say something about the person I apparently aspired to be in the olden days: a type of frontierswoman in a Habit, burying whole animals in hot coals for my clansmen, brewing moonshine and getting pissed on it while chatting in Sanskrit to lots of foreigners round a crackling beach fire and sketching Tullio Lombardo's Bacchus and Ariadne on the back of an envelope fashioned from a doily. Or some such rubbish.

I don't know who on earth I thought I was back then, but she's certainly only an echo of my current self, such has my life slithered backwards. Having said that, one of them I unearthed is about Christina Rossetti, poetess sister of my hero Dante Gabriel, written by Georgina Battiscombe. In a vivacious hand on the fly-leaf inside, it's signed 'Julian Vinogradoff, Broughton Grange, Banbury.' Tucked neatly between the pages I found a letter from my father saying 'here is the book! It was in a box of books I bought at an auction at Holloway's!'  Julian was the daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell - surely a woman ahead of her time. What a weird and wonderful life she led. I have Sandra Jobson Darroch's biography of Ottoline too and together they'll go in my 'keep' pile.