The joy of text

I was doing a bibliography the other night. You may very well ask why.

In fact, between my wondering whether to semi- a colon, or colon a comma, my lifting up of a publisher title and bodily carrying it from one room to another, weighing up a series of ampersands so as to determine their average weight in metric kilograms, getting distracted and using an em dash as a cricket bat with the dot on the top of a lower case ‘i' as a ball, in the process breaking a spice jar, opening a parenthesis and letting in a rather cold breeze, putting all the numbers in alphabetical order, the letters in numerical order, and the apostrophes in both, and wondering whether to file The King James Bible under A for Anonymous, G for God, J for James, or M for Miscellaneous, I asked myself the very same question. What am I doing? What are bibliographies for, anyway? Is this really what my life has come down to, shifting a series of letters and numbers around the page while the chickens creep inside the house and try to nick the cat food?

But then I spotted a full stop and wondered whether it should be italicised or not, the question of which satisfyingly occupied my mind, and I continued merrily on my way putting the ‘og’ into bibliography.