Kindle? Kock off.

Books. I adore them. The way they look, feel, smell, sound and taste - so they please all of my senses. (I have to point out that I know how they taste due to often nodding off whilst reading and awaking with a dribbly mouth full of Chapter27)

As my late grandpa was an author and a bookseller, they also please a different, more supernaturallish type sense, and transport me back to childhood, surrounded by piles of books as bemused shoppers pointed at the feral child sat in the RespectableBookShop window, nose-deep in books galore. I learned to read around my fourth birthday. By seven I had read all the 'set' reading books. By nine I was on Jackie Collins novels swiped from mothers bookcase. At ten, I had the copy of Flowers In The Attic I was ploughing through taken off me. As it was a rather maudlin and dirty book, I was never bothered about finding out how it ended. So yes. I love me some books. I love me some reading. Six books on the go at once has not been unheard of.

I also loved my grandpa; he was a gentle pacifist, an intelligent, before-his-time man, who accepted my scandalous existence without hesitation.

My grandparents lived in a house with a massive garden, right next to a church which had the most exquisite bells. Yes, bells. I used to stay the night there at least once a week, and would help grandpa do some gardening in the morning as the bells called the faithful. I made a vow, that one day, I too would live within the sound of the bells, as I helped with weeding and ran shrieking from worms.Grandpa loved his garden, though nanny told me last year that he actually wasn't very good at it, with more enthusiasm than skill. He spent the last few years of his life trying to grow a clematis. It didn't happen, they kept dying. Until the first summer after his death, when it burst into life and was still going for many years afterward.

I was devastated when grandpa died. Cancer. I wasn't allowed to see him in the last few weeks, and wasn't allowed to go to his funeral, as I was "too young to understand". Ha. The fact that I would never see him again  was very easy to comprehend, and I'm actually crying now as I write this, almost thirty years later.

So books, to me, are a sacred link between grandpa and me. I cannot destroy or mistreat a book, and one thing I yearned for during the years in our cramped and horrible flat, was a wall of bookshelves, floor to ceiling with wonderful books. Now grandpa, due to his wonderful forward thinking modernity, would have probably loved one of those electronic book reader THINGS. He wasn't a sentimental fool like me. Antiques were to be sold, houses were to be cleared, books moved on. So yes, I think, were he alive today, I would have bought him a Kindle for his 100th birthday last year.

But today I am sitting here, my wall of Billy Bookcases behind me, stuffed full of books and the odd antique he'd picked up in a house clearance and given to me, and sometimes, I can feel his presence. That half-miracle I told you about? It saved my life and led us to our new home. We'd just moved in, and I'm pottering in the garden - and then I heard them. The bells from my childhood. Our new, decent, safe home was within the sound of the bells. You know in films when a character has their moment of realisation, all the pieces fall into place, the cogs whirr and they have their epiphany? That. Everything I had prayed, yearned, wished for, was Here.

Thank you, Grandpa. I love you.