Balance

The children's librarians are being picked on. "Tell the world about the Reference Librarians," they suggest.

We've just spent £1,000 on a couple of Balkan trade directories for the use of one of their customers, who's been coming in every day for the past eight weeks to ask if "the books I ordered have come in yet." That's one of their customers. That's the service that refuses to buy crossword-solving books for branch libraries because "they're expensive for what they are and serious readers don't use them."

In the circumstances it's probably as well if I don't tell the world about them.