A different type of love affair!.....NaBloPoMo day 16

'Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.' ~Mark Twain

As I have often blogged about, I love books. I love all things bookish. I am completely crazy about my books. I love them and cherish them like they were my own children. I get all excited about new books arriving in the post. I love the smell of a new book and the feeling of the crisp white paper. Equally, I love going into a second hand book shop and the smell of the books wafts to me and clings to my very clothes! Its like an Aladdin's cave of treasures waiting to be discovered!  I can't wait to get started into a story and get to know all the characters, find out what makes them tick and decide whether I like them or not! Quite often I can be found with a book in my hand whilst trying to make the dinner or when I've got a spare five minutes. I always carry a book in my bag and another one in the car! Well you never know when you are going to get stuck in a huge traffic jam or buried under 6 feet of snow! I have enough books in my house to see me through a winter in the Rocky Mountains if I needed to! My husband, son and step daughter are all keen readers but even they cannot understand my addiction to books! I think my mother in law, who is a bookworm understands a bit but can't get her head round my reading tastes. Whilst she reads nothing but romance and religious stuff, I read all manner of books. I do have favourite genres of course but will give almost anything a go! While most women love to go out clothes shopping, I love to go out book shopping. Take a recent trip out with my friends. Although I did not buy a book, I helped a friend choose one! In my little mind, a book was bought! My craving was abated a little. Though I did buy a very fancy notebook! Anyway, why the addiction to books you might ask? It started when I was a small child.

My childhood was poor. Poor in the sense of poverty and poor in the sense of it wasn't very happy. My parents had an awful marriage and there was not much happiness about with constant midnight escapes to my grandmother's house to live there for days, weeks or months at a time. My grandmother was the typical fairy story wicked grandmother and thought that children were nothing more than a hindrance so she gave us money to try to get rid of us.  It was a very limited amount of pocket money but what money I could get my hands on I bought books with. If I had no money I borrowed books from the local library. Books transported me to a whole new world where grandmothers were kind and caring little old ladies with their grey hair in buns and  they did not hit you or call you horrible names! In books, good people always won through, overcame diversity and magic and fairies were as common as cars and buses! I was like Jo March from Little Women, struggling to keep her family together and afloat and was so proud of Jo for selling her hair. Could I sell my beautiful long blonde hair to help my family? Small shoulders carrying a huge burden where the weight of the world sometimes seemed too heavy to bear. I imagined that Black Beauty would gallop over the horizon and take me somewhere faraway! We'd hide in The Secret Garden and hope to meet Peter Pan and Wendy! Me and my hair would be safe!

As a child, these characters were real to me. They gave me some hope that there was a magical place outside of my bedroom that didn't have the sound of parents fighting, windows being smashed and the police banging on the door! A place were we didn't have to hide from debt collectors or tiptoe past the drunken bum, usually my father, who was lying unconcious at the bottom of the stairs!  With my head stuck inside a book I could pretend these things weren't happening. I could be someone different, somewhere different! A place were I didn't have to hide anything of value for fear of it being sold or given away.  On the days where the safest place was hiding inside my bedroom, I imagined I was a princess locked inside a magical tower like Sleeping Beauty, and a prince would rescue me. I had a little stash of coins hidden away there too because any money that was found by my father was used to buy alcohol. He'd be happy but I'd be bookless!!! The one story which made me cry however was the story of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Not many people have heard of this story but it is about a poor little girl who tries to sell matches in the freezing cold winter to make ends meet. But she is so cold that she lights the matches to try and keep warm and sees a vision of her dead grandmother. The little girl dies in the end and is carried to heaven by her grandmother. It broke my heart! In my little fantasy world, good children didn't die! I was a good child! A compliant and quiet child! I needed stories of love, bravery and new lives to be had in faraway lands! Of course, as I got older I had resigned myself to the fact that not all fairy stories came true and that life is hard and reality is harsh. But, that didn't stop me disappearing into books and in fact it renewed and invigorated my love of reading even more!

So, here I am as an adult, trying to solve the odd murder mystery or solving deep dark family secrets! I'm the heroine in every crime story and the love interest in every romance! You get the general idea! All of us at some time or another need a bit of escapism. And, as much as it annoys me to admit it, we sometimes need to read that other people's lives are as bad or worse as our own! We seem to thrive on other people's misery! Books for me are as important as having a heart that beats and a set of lungs that work well! They are the machine that drives my body, my psyche and help me to sometimes go in search of  the weird, wonderful or downright unbelievable. Please don't read this blog and think that I have missed out on so much through my childhood because I haven't. I've been lucky enough to wave at the trains with the Railway children and had a picnic in the Secret Garden.  I've helped Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys solve mystery after mystery, been scared out of my wits by goblins and ghosts and I've even been to Narnia! I've run across the moors with Heathcliff and Cathy and swooned over Mr Darcy! Heck I've even helped Sherlcok Holmes!  How many people  have lived the wonderful life I have and continue to have? The adventures never stop and never will!

' The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.' ~Howard Pyle

'Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.' ~Author Unknown