‘Concealing them in supermarket bags’: Frances Whiting on her secret addiction

I have quite a few (hundred) of these items and when I bring home new ones, I hide them from my husband.

Frances Whiting says her love of books was behind the latest “row” in her home, with her husband saying she has an addiction.

My husband John and I had a “discussion” the other day. You know when you have a “discussion”? It’s another name for a fight for married people. Or people who have been together for a long time.

It is what we have when we want to pretend we are grown ups who are perfectly capable of having a rational conversation about something we feel strongly about. In some partnerships, this is also known as “a talk” – for example: “Could we have a talk about you constantly parking your car behind mine in the garage, darling?”

The key word here, by the way, is “constantly” – this is how you know you are not, in fact, having a “talk”, but a fight. And don’t be fooled by the “darling”, either, this is a decoy word to temporarily disarm the other person before going in for the kill.

Frances Whiting on what motherhood is really like

The very surprising way to avoid magpies attacking you

Anyway, the other day, my husband, John, said he would like to have a discussion with me about my books. I have quite a few of them.

How many? Well, put it this way, if our local library ever (God forbid) closes down, I could just buy a laminator, a photocopier, pop out some orange cones for parking and we’d be in business.

So, I have quite a few (hundred) books and when I bring home new ones, I hide them from my husband the way other women hide their Amazon purchases.

John feels I have a book addiction, that this is an increasingly serious problem, and during our discussion suggested I might like to “rein it in”.

I said he might like to rein himself in, because that’s the sort of mature person I am.

After our discussion, where I agreed to not buy any more books for a specified period of time, I bought some more and hid them from him by concealing them in supermarket grocery bags.

This system was working very well – honestly there are times when I feel I am wasted as a journalist when I could be part of an international smuggling ring – until the other day. I was smuggling a few more in when he looked at me just as I was making my getaway up the stairs.

“What’s in the bags?” he asked. “Groceries,” I squeaked.

“Really,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “Well why are you taking them upstairs? Those had better not be books, Frances.”

“Books!” I exclaimed, “the very idea.”

He had the right idea, though, and he might have a point. I probably do have too many books, but as far as addictions go, surely this is the best one to have.

Frances Whiting. Picture: David Kelly

I’m not a shoe girl. Or a handbag girl. Or a designer label girl. I am, however, a Dunne girl. A Hornby girl. A Wesley, Fitzgerald and Allende girl. I am also a Wodehouse, Marquez, Rothschild and Didion girl.

A book girl. And being a book girl means a lifetime of happiness, or learning, of armchair travelling to places I may never get to see except within their pages. It means moments curled up in corners with new friends and old (hello Pippi Longstocking, Bridget Jones and Mr Darcy) which means, I told my husband, he gets more time to do the things he loves, like surfing and playing guitar.

And that, my friends, is how you win the “discussion”.