I feel the need, the need to read

I remember seeing a sign outside a supermarket a while back, Run out of wine? it asked, and I scoffed. Wine is a luxury item, staples are what you run out of and need to rush to the shop last-minute for, I said. Who considers themselves to have 'run out of' wine?

It could be relevant at this juncture to point out that I don't drink wine.

I do read books though, and with no reviewing going on at the moment (the Bookbag's cupboard has been relatively bare for a while) I've worked my way through a great chunk of my To Read pile. There's still one Christmas present to read but it's non-fiction and yesterday afternoon, with only half an hour's worth of second-hand crime novel to go, I realised I wasn't quite in the mood for it. I could have bought the next Tad Williams novel for the kobo, as I've still got an unspent voucher from my last birthday. I could have stuck to the half-finished short story collections I've got lying around, but I like to pick at them and leave time between morsels. I looked at the To Read list (books to borrow or buy when I get round to it) and made a decision.

At that point I had an hour before the local library closed, not to reopen until Monday morning. It takes fifteen minutes to walk to the library if I'm brisk, so I had plenty of time. I checked the online catalogue, selected two books that were available, made a note of which shelves they were on, grabbed a bag. We had a minor domestic crisis (feline related), but I opened the front door twenty-five minutes before the library shut. The wind, which had sounded fairly gusty indoors, was howling and once I reached the next street, blowing me backwards. I was fighting to step forwards instead of on the spot. I checked my watch halfway down the hill. Ten minutes till closing time.

The grille was half across the door when I got there, the library empty save for one man behind the counter. I dashed across the room to social sciences, grabbed Grayson Perry's Descent of Man, hurried over to history and spotted Stuart Maconie's Jarrow book as I approached, reaching out for it as I neared the shelf. Within a minute and a half of entering the building and still with a couple of minutes to spare I was handing my books over, out of breath, hair at all angles, scrabbling in my pocket for the library card I hoped I hadn't left at home. The librarian looked bemused, but he's seen me many times before so I assume he'll have realised it was an emergency. Because as everyone knows, although you can't run out of wine, you can run out of books.