I can’t stop buying books – perhaps I’ll get round to reading them one day

Buying books is a completely different hobby to reading books. I enjoy both but prefer the former, writes Rupert Hawksley

Books provide a sort of permanence in your life (Getty/iStock)

Whenever I feel sad or listless at the end of the day I take the tube to Green Park and walk up Piccadilly to Waterstones. There is also Hatchards on the way. I browse, pick things up and put them down again. It usually takes about half an hour before I decide to buy a book but after that almost everything that catches my eye comes home with me. Sometimes that means six or seven books; often a lot more. Almost none of them will be read.

At other times, I spend and spend on Amazon and when the parcel arrives, I can hardly remember what I ordered. At lunch, I will pop out to the local charity shops and buy greasy paperbacks and cheap editions of classics. There is an Oxfam not far from where I live that seems to stock every major contemporary novel, just a year or so after it was published. And so my room fills up with piles of books; boxes of the things clutter my childhood bedroom; needless to say, moving house is hell.

Buying books is a completely different hobby to reading books. I enjoy both but prefer the former. This might sound self-defeating. Why buy a book you won’t read? Good question. All I know is that I get an odd tingle in my stomach, a strange little high, when I start splurging. The more I spend, the more giddy I become. It’s addictive and I’m sure a therapist would have something to say about it.