excess

or, Too Many Things

Is a man travelling light who travels with six varieties of pumpkin?

I've just got home from Cambridge. Coming home from Cambridge is a task not to be underestimated but my trouble is that every term I underestimate it. "It's not going to take me six hours to pack, this time, and - really, really - I do not need a pasta machine." Going up at the end of September, I tried to be judicious when it came to books. I'd only take the ones I couldn't easily get from the Queens' or English libraries and which I would definitely read/use/refer to at least each week. The largest genre in this category was cookery. I had all of Elizabeth David (any self-respecting food-person would do). I had Simon Hopkinson and I had Richard Olney (again). I had Nigella and Hugh (embarassing). I had Rick Stein (I like him). By the end of the term I'd acquired Constance Spry (my friend Alex thought I'd be interested and I am). I'd printed eighteenth century books - by writers like Ann Cook and Richard Bradley - off Eighteenth Century Collections Online (historical interest and my, er, dissertation). The inventory goes on. But you can glean that I had a lot of cookbooks and that I now have even more.

And I credit myself; I referred to them daily.

Besides those I had a few books of poetical/literary reference (where would I be without Terry Eagleton?). I had books with pictures of the Bloomsbury group in (for a would-be dissertation). I had the Symposium and I had James Baldwin (any self-respecting lit-gay would do). I've come home with two different books entitled "Camp" and others with titles like "Another Kind of Love".

My book buying is not only too frequent, it's too much. It has become, like my dissertation on camp, a parody of me.

What's more, my fruit and ornament buying, if not parodic, have become ridiculous. This is partly due to the fact that this term the two became one. Today I had two sacks of fruit to bring home: one of oranges and satsumas and nuts I'd strewn around the room with what I imagined was abandon; the other full of apples and pumpkins I'd ornamented my mantelpiece with for the seasonal colour, and the feeling of laying up stores.

I get huffy with my mum when she looks with ironical eyes at my term's acquisitions. I protest that this time I travelled light - I didn't bring half the stuff I could've - so shut up yeah. It cost me. I've suffered a term without my complete Dickens.

But I hated myself today when, my stuff crammed unceremoniously into the boot of mum's estate, the tires looked set to burst. The weight of my possessions became very real. The image said: you have too many things. But I feel like Cambridge is a place for excess, for pumpkins and marble pestle and mortars and things if they take your fancy. I mention marble pestle and mortars because the one I got with the Divertimenti voucher Johan gave me for my birthday I just adore. Victoria laughed at it when she saw it a couple of days ago. "It's funny the things people get a thrill from," she said. "If someone gave that to me, I'd be, what the fuck?" But I do adore it. I think it's fabulous because it's too much, unnecessary and extremely so - but I also feel that in itself it's a quite beautiful object. Does that make any difference? I don't know.

I just have to hope I haven't falsely associated the idea of having things with significance.

Eight or nine weeks at university isn't travelling. It is, I sometimes like to fancy, living, and I don't want to live my weeks too lightly.

Having said that, I concede it's a shame there was no room in the car for my Christmas tree.