Philosophical Investigations

Ah, now. As you know, I'm a bit of a bibliophile. I thought I could handle it at first, you know how it is; a couple of paperback novels every now and then, just for the kicks really. Then you find that you start hanging around bookshops, trying a bit of history, a bit of poetry. Of course, you keep away from the Philosophy books - you've heard all the stories about what a bit of Nietzsche can do to the mind and how an old school-friend OD'd on Wittgenstein.

Then one day you find that SF and spy thrillers just don't get you there any longer and so you sidle up to the philosophy shelves and score a bit of Russell, just to try it - promising yourself that it will be just the once and that wouldn't hurt you - you can handle it. After all you've read Joyce, AJP Taylor and all those other heavyweights; philosophy can't be that different can it?

But one fix is never enough: Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Plato and then one day you wake up on a park bench with a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason open on your bony chest. You know then it is all over - a Kant addict.

You become just another of those dishevelled bearded figures that haunt the second-hand bookshops and the charity stores feverishly picking your way through every new consignment of books, looking for those discarded by failed philosophy students; some Ethics essays, a critical examination of Descartes, anything to keep away those withdrawal symptoms.

You hear of courses, aversion therapy three solid weeks of daytime TV that destroys every philosophy receptor in the brain and you promise yourself that one day… one day. But not today as your second-hand bookshop dealer has promised you that today, finally, the consignment from the recently-deceased Philosophy professor's library is due in, promising a whole shelf-full of Platonic dialogues, Existential treatises and a monograph on J. S. Mill.