For the last two weeks I have been sitting at this round table in the living room with the bay windows open, listening to children riding bikes on the road outside and the cry of the odd seagull, and I’ve been staring up at the bookshelves in front of me.

I moved in here to let Lori have full range on the study desk, and so that I could spread out my folders and books and notepads and stick-it notes all over our dining room table, They get ungraciously shoved aside at lunchtimes. I like working in here, in this big cream room with the poinsettia (Fred the Second - he’s been alive for eight months now) for company. From here I can see Venice, Lacoste in the Luberon Valley, and the steps of Montmartre: memories in frames. And I can see our books.

They oscillate between inspiration and distraction; it all depends where my eyes land. There’s the travel section, which makes my feet itch to leave the room, and the country. The lit-crit section sometimes refocuses me, reminds me what I should be doing instead of staring at spines.

The novels overwhelm me in their penguin classic uniforms. The poetry section is tempting: just a short poem wouldn’t take too much time. My undergraduate dissertation is hiding in a corner nudging the wood, impatient for its neighbour, which is in the process of conception in bits and pieces under my fingertips.

Then there are the types of books that could get me out of my seat.

There’s Christopher Meyer’s D.C. Confidential, our “read aloud” book of the moment. We perch on opposite ends of the tired white sofa and pass the book over our knees, a chapter at a time.

There’s a book called A World of Ideas that pops out in gold on black. A great title. (It sits beside A History of Knowledge, which is surprisingly slim for such an ambitious combination of words).

The first book is the Bible. The last is the Viking Portable Victorian Reader in the Anthologies section.

Nestled amongst them all are the thin spines of my very favourites. Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is bright green and tiny. The Imagineering Way and its Workout friend announce themselves in vibrant colour. They are perhaps the most “plucked” of the books, shuffled out for inspiration during moments of dullness. Billy Collins looks inconsequentially small, especially compared with the Collins English dictionary and Richardson’s Clarissa. Just to show good things often come with small spines.

There are some just aching to be read. New York City Secrets is top of that list at the moment. Its red cardboard sleeve suggest travel guide – the likes of Baedeker (a 1908 Central Italy edition sits beside it) or Murray - but it slips off to reveal a blue cloth cover, suitably subtle.

We are having an overflow problem, so there are a handful of books lying sideways: Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, a Times/WHSmith 99p number. Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline and Celestina. Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, unread, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, read cover-to-cover over the Atlantic in March.

There’s a wind up alarm clock – stopped at 5:34 because it ticks too loud – hiding the MLA Handbook, and a stuffed monkey reclining in front of Jane Austen’s letters.

These are the things I spend my day thinking about, between spurts of activity.