Then dementia whispered in the Professor’s ear. It was only a whisper, but he decided to get in early. He resigned from the university, cancelled his TLS subscription, and had the books sold as a job lot.

The next time I visited, there were no books at all. It was as if a single volume would be enough to remind the Professor of his prior acuity. The house now felt emptied of its owner, as if he’d been bundled out along with his books.

I think to myself: that won’t happen to me. I just need to clean the books and reorganise the shelves. But which method to use?

The Federal MP for Macquarie, Susan Templeman, tells me she began collecting books as a child, covering each in plastic and marking it with a Dewey number, like a proper librarian. She lost her treasured collection in the bushfires of 2013, but her story inspires me.

Some of my friends organise by colour and are much mocked for it, yet they can find a volume faster than most. “The latest from Ann Patchett? That would be These Precious Days. Bluish-green spine. Ah, here it is.”

I, meanwhile, am ridiculed for a bookshelf in which European fiction is organised as to latitude, with the icy Scandinavians on the top shelf, then working our way down to the sunny Mediterranean. Crazy? You may think so, but request a copy of Zorba The Greek, and I’ll lean down to the temperate climes of the bottom shelf and be handing it over before the theme music has stopped playing in your head.

There are no rights and wrongs. One friend, a writer of non-fiction, has an immense library organised along the principles of, well, complete chaos. The books sit in baskets, or heaped on a bench, or piled high on the floor. Taxidermied animals pose atop the teetering stacks. Ask him for a title, though, and he can always find it.

I set about cleaning the books on our shelves. The particularly mouldy volumes are given time in the sun. “It’s been a while,” Jocasta says, “since D.H. Lawrence enjoyed his time in the sun.”

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I wedge open the books to let in the air and light. Jocasta, I notice, has inscribed her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the phrase “sex is ludicrous, see page 179.” I decide to not check out the passage, lest there be another loin.

The sun floods in. The mould is kept at bay. The shelves, once restacked, are less chaotic, and less furry. And by the time we drop dead, who knows, maybe D.H Lawrence will be back in favour.

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