Purchasers of houses do not like books. They make houses look old and tired. Lose the books!” I heard this advice in one of those “how to sell your house” makeover programmes, addressed to the hapless owner of a house (like mine) stuffed with books.

The madeover television house never has books. It has a single candle in the fireplace and pointless sculpted objects, and pebbles, and clever lamps – but nowhere to put books. Or hang your hat or swing your cat. It doesn’t have a larder or walk-in storage cupboard, desk, bike or dog basket. Just a leather sofa, a plasma TV screen and acres of wooden flooring between.

Just look at any advert for a “stunning” new apartment: “Incorporating pure silk wall-coverings, bespoke furniture sourced from around the world and an integrated audio-visual system, this apartment is one of the most sophisticated and stylish in London. Rent £4,000 a week.” No visible bookshelves.

This would not surprise Professor George Steiner, who predicted years ago that reading would become a monastic and solitary pursuit, as it was originally, confined to the literate minority. Look on the Tube: people are texting and listening to iPods, not turning pages. True, bookshops are packed at Christmas, but books are “a luxury item” now, a bookseller told me on Christmas Eve. He didn’t have The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, which Simon Jenkins had just recommended on Radio 4. But there was a pile of Do Ants Have Arseholes?and plenty ofWho Writes This Crap?

I staggered home with the Ted Hughes letters and the Noël Coward letters (weighing 4lb each) knowing that there would be no space for them in this unsaleable house, where books are stacked behind doors, under desks, on and below stairs, in the cellar. It was time to google the Kindle. The Kindle, portable and pocket-sized, weighing just over 10oz (283g), is Amazon’s latest electronic reading device: $399 (£200), with 200,000 titles available. Not out here yet, but in America it sold out instantly.

Surely, I tell myself, clinging on to books (including a roomful of long-outgrown children’s books) is as crazy as keeping every item of clothing since the age of 5 hung up on the walls on show for ever. Have you ever heard a wall of bookshelves crashing down? I have. When the thunderous rumbling abated, there was an Everest of books and rubble on the carpet. I did not heed that warning; the shelves were rebuilt.

The habit of hanging on to even unread books was scorned by Helene Hanff, of 84 Charing Cross Road fame – “Otherwise, how would people know that you’re educated, right?” she said witheringly. Her tiny New York apartment had just a single bookshelf. Nothing was less sacrosanct to her than a mediocre book. I did not heed her either.

A friend who downsized ruthlessly last year, from family house to rented flat, said that it was agony. But being an agony aunt by profession, she was upbeat about it: “If you need a book that you’ve junked, you can always get it within 24 hours, online, and dirt cheap.” But it was still agony, because each book reflects a slice of your life: childhood, student days, first and later loves.

My books’ endpapers are covered in scribbles, review notes, lecture notes; they have yellowing reviews tucked inside their torn covers, dedications on fly-leaves, authors’ signatures. Every book – from Molesworth and Just William and Stuart Little, to political Pelicans (now history) to dark green Viragos and illustrated Folios, to first editions bought at auction when I was feeling rich, to paperbacks oil-stained on Greek beaches and jotted with hilarious menu items – is a memory. Books have tentacles because of what they represent. A book-lined room announces that here is a world of silence and slow time, the obverse of “a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness” (Steiner again).

I want to hold them, not click on them. On these dark wintry mornings I reach out for Rupert Everett, which is bliss. No volume is left unmarked. You can’t do that with a Kindle, can you? Yes, apparently you can highlight passages (click) and dog-ear the corner (click) to mark your place. But it’s not A BOOK. As Groucho Marx said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.” (He added: “Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.”) I have yet to reply to Sir Tom Stoppard, who wrote to all members of the London Library (to which I am pathetically attached, however rarely I browse its dusty stacks) explaining the rise in annual subscriptions from £210 to £375. How many books could I buy for that sum, I wonder? This way madness, and resignation, lies.

So let’s start the cull. I reach out at random from my desk and find The Kemsley Manual of Journalism, published in 1950, unopened since childhood. Opening it again I find that it is signed by (Viscount) Kemsley! And the chapter on foreign news is by Ian Fleming! I google it and find it is a “collectable”: £10 to £75. But no, I will not flog a book that belonged to my pa, who had in 1950 just achieved his ambition to be a cartoonist, on a Kemsley paper. Books are more than just books. Mine, like everyone’s, are life’s milestones. But they are also millstones. And the Kindle may be as ubiquitous as the Blackberry by next Christmas. So soon? Yes. The typewriter went, and so did the vinyl LP, and the cassette.

I can imagine the children despairing one day, not over one’s death but over the books. Some house-clearance outfit will tell them that there’s no call for books any more, even from libraries; and they will cart them off to the dump.

Answers from a postcard, please

One of the last poems of the late James Michie (“Jaspistos” of The Spectator) was his Collage: a postcard poem, “14 sentences culled from postcards received over the years”. I decided it would make a good party game. Here’s mine: So many kind words and letters about Dad. Tynan was right – theatre of passion and ideas is crucial.

I liked Catherine’s story of getting Eliot on television.

Don’t you wish life was as serene as this painting?

Crisp snow and blue skies, fireworks at midnight on the green.

Ah, if only all 2002 is like that. Do you know Faye Inchfawn? I’m looking for a tramp steamer as soon as I’ve finished my novel.

Have you been bankrupted by your dentist? Jane and I are in Sheffield, setting about high society.

Deirdre complained about the smell of garlic for 36 hours.

I have reached the Green Caravan. Please come before Bush blows us all up. Long live the ups and downs of life.

Masterful tribute

I hope you read this in time to catch Tony Palmer’s tribute to Ralph Vaughan Williams,O Thou Transcendent, on Five today at 9am. Like all Palmer’s work on composers, it is masterful, focusing with a muscular intensity on the symphonies – interspersed with harrowing footage of war and famine – and the choral music: “If people don’t sing, they aren’t whole,” Vaughan Williams said. It is also a chance to hear some splendid voices of an almost-vanished generation, not least that of Vaughan Williams’s widow, Ursula, who was a poet and librettist, became RVW’s lifeline and wrote his excellent biography. Recorded by Palmer just before she died last year at 96, she says of her husband: “He was a perfect man, and a sweet man, and a delicious man, and I love him.”

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