My kitchen floor’s a mess again.

What with books to read, poems to write, creative writing groups to facilitate and sick cats to pet, I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s no time to mop the floor. Or clean the windows (you have to do that more than once a year? Really?).

That’s the trouble with household chores like cleaning. You get it  all done, and then in an instant,  it needs doing again. And time can be so much better spent reading.

I mean, good books don’t read themselves, do they?

It was probably a bit of a coincidence, but the day I heard that Helen Dunmore had died, her novel ‘Burning Bright’ fell of the shelf in front of me. I took it as a sign to re-read it, which I did (lovely lyrical writing). It happened to be among a pile of books that all needed revisiting. I had a go at Leon Garfield’s children’s novel ’Smith’ about a Victorian street urchin with a conscience (my copy bears a bookplate showing that I gave it originally to my sister for Christmas in 1973). Then I read PG Wodehouse’s ‘Heavy Weather’, which was everything a ridiculous farce about uppercrust Brits in yesteryear should be.

After that, Emma Donoghue’s short stories ‘Touchy Subjects’ kept me quiet for a while, then I read ‘The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine’, an enjoyable No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency story from Alexander McCall Smith, followed by a re-read of Anne Enright’s dark look at Irish family life, ‘The Gathering’ (which won the Man Booker in 2007).

I’ve managed to fit in a few more-recently published books, ‘One Bad Turn’, a well-written, fast-paced thriller by Sinead Crawley; ‘Lie With Me’ by Sabine Durrant, a page turner with an unexpected twist at the end; and Anthony Horowitz’s ‘Magpie Murders’. This last one was a Book Club choice and I’ll hear how other members found it later this week.

For me, it felt like I was in the middle of a Cluedo game, with a whodunit within a whodunit which was surprisingly compulsive.  Even after I cheated and read the ending when I was only about a quarter way through (I’m often guilty of this), I had to go back and read the whole thing properly so as not to miss any of the clever twists and turns. It was all rather Midsomer Murders, but then, why wouldn’t it be? – the same prolific author created both. And the book is full of unashamed name-dropping and amusing digs at the publishing industry.

I’ve missed a few Book Club meetings recently, but I try to keep up with the titles under scrutiny, which is how I came to read the beautifully written but incredibly sad semi-auto biographical story about life with a profoundly disabled child, ‘The Mouse-proof Kitchen’ by Saira Shah. One of the things I like about being in a Book Club is reading and discussing titles I wouldn’t have otherwise chosen to read.

You’d wonder with all this reading how I ever manage to have any kind of a life?

Well, I don’t.

Leastways, not one that includes mopping kitchen floors.