We are at the stage now of moving from having a ‘child’ to having a ‘teenager’ and with that comes a re-arranging his bedroom!

Dearest Son has one of those beds that has a ladder which gives a large amount of space underneath – currently FULL of storage boxes of all shapes and sizes. We have sorted out a few things and I realise we have a long way to go but we decided to take the first step towards better organising and went hunting for a couple of shelves and a bookcase.

Easy, right?

Well, you would think so.

We went to 3 different places to begin with. One was a big DIY type of place which does flat-pack styles of furniture for you to take and assemble at home. We saw some shelves, we saw the prices and moved on – they weren’t even nice to look at! We didn’t see a bookcase though. There were plastic ‘shelving units’ which Dearest Son looked at and rightly said, “Well that will last 10 minutes”: it wasn’t cheap either.

Next shop was a second hand place which had a lot of furniture, but not a single bookcase or shelf. Luckily, the third place was nearby so we went in for a look. Row after row or organising gizmos – some of which I actually liked the look of. Eventually we found 2 large wooden shelves which we thought would look good so we took them and looked for a bookcase – nothing. Lots of plastic frames with fabric ‘shelving’ but no actual, real, ‘places for your books’, bookshelves. I know people have kindles but I’m the type of person who wants to hold the book, feel its pages, breathe in its air as I dive in, in fact, in this house, we are all like that. But this situation got me thinking.

Is this the ‘style’ we are now in or have been convinced to be in, where people aren’t expected to have an affordable bookcase in their house anymore? I say ‘affordable’ because, if you go to some places online, and you’re willing to pay big, you can actually get a bookcase. Does this mean owning books is equated to wealth? I don’t know what other conclusion I’m supposed to come to.

The problem is, in this case, its being linked to financial wealth, whereas, books bring with them an entirely different kind of wealth; a wealth of stories, facts, myths, travel, imagination, character, places and emotions to name only a few.

Maybe there isn’t a bookcase big enough to hold all of that.