I'd left stacks of books in my parents house, and I couldn't delay retrieving them any longer. With two towering, empty, shiny new Ikea bookcases in my apartment taunting me to fill them, I devoted a Saturday afternoon to the task.

I started first with the cupboard above my old bed, which I'd often feared would crush me as I slept, (‘Neglected To-be-read pile attacks reader in bed’) went straight into boxes and when those ran out, sturdy shopping bags.

 It was the attic where the real craic would start. I was pretty sure I had three boxes of books squeezed somewhere between the water tank and the eaves. The last time I'd climbed into the space, back in early spring, I was visiting two humane mouse traps, with the little blighters naturally still alive and bouncing off the perspex walls. I'd taken the traps a mile out of town and rehomed the lads in an abandoned cottage.

Now ascending the ladder, peeking through the panel door, I half expected them to be waiting on me with a couple of little suitcases. 'Weathers turning, Adrian. Thought it was time to come back. That was the deal, right? Anyway, we'll keep the noise down this time. Books, oh yeah, I had a wee nibble on that John Cheese biography and the one about Chairman Mouse. Haha. No honestly, they're fine. Over there between the water tank and the eaves, yeah.'

But no sign of Stuart Little and his wee cousin. Just all the unwanted belongings that you can’t throw out because you might need them, suitcases and general detritus that accumulate over thirty years of family life, stuffed into every available space. Getting into my parents attic is a good way to check your general fitness, dexterity and balance. It's just unfortunate the price you pay might be a large one as you slip on a 1989 GCSE Economics study guide and topple headlong down through the gap.

I somehow managed to avoid that fate, but there was a slight fumble as I descended, the taped up cardboard box of twenty books balanced between my head and the ladder starting to topple (I know, but I needed my hands for the rungs) but I quickly regained my balance and miraculously the box didn’t fall. My watching mother got her breath back eventually.

 I packed the rest of the cargo and, with the help of my brother in law, joint chief of removals over the last few months, got them transported safely. It was late afternoon the following day by the time I felt energised enough to start tackling the boxes. It wasn't enough to start piling them onto the shelves; I felt like I needed a system. I placed my ‘To-be-read’ pile on the top shelf, so they could look down, reminding me before I bought anymore that I needed to give time to them first. I combined psychology and meditation to free up a bit of space for science, philosophy and politics. Music biographies were going to be squeezed in next to a couple of sports books. Neither would be happy with that. Paperbacks alone accounted for four shelves. At this rate I would I need another trip to Ikea. My books were now little molehills scattered around my apartment as I loosely put then into categories.

 I loved finding the Bukowski book of poems my then girlfriend had inscribed with love for Christmas, ‘93. The Salem’s lot that I read and held with one hand before school, whilst balancing a bowl of Rice Krispies on my knee. The thriller that a kind heartened aunt and uncle had bought me when I'd ripped the ligaments in my knee and was laid up for a whole summer whilst my schoolmates partied, that I read high and semi lucid on painkillers, and which haunted my busted dreams on the couch.

Being thankful I'd brought a book as lengthy as Papillon as I stood in yet another queue, this time outside the Dali museum in Figueres, Northern Spain. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, that I read between shifts in an underwear factory after I left university and just needed to pay bills, and fast. Books that I read, slowly, in the depths, just to see if I could still feel. Books that I gripped like a life raft in stormy seas. I'm sitting here now and can see the titles that I read in a wet weekend and others where I only had the attention span for a couple of sentences at a time. But I can see them all, these books in their new home. They are a trail of breadcrumbs through my life and I am grateful for all of them.