Hello?

T. Aldous has just spent two hours trying to convince me that the BBC's Read & Write initiative is a major problem that we couldn't work with. At one point I heard me tell him that if we weren't in the business of promoting literacy and weren't prepared to try and help customers find reading material that met their needs then we had no business calling ourselves public libraries.

He came back into my office a few times with "proof" of the BBC's perfidy: "look, they sent this email at eight o'clock!" (eh?)

In the end even he realised he'd gone too far and kept out of my way when Mary suggested it might be prudent. I'd told her that I would kill Huxtable if he came within three yards of me.