His own white leather toilet seat

It wouldn't be March without a few dozen new chairs in the fire escape corridor...

Some marigolds on my pillow

Incoming bits and bobs. A few old, knackered PCs that the reference library at Dutch Bend have foisted on us. Some broken keyboards. A box of cable ends for old dumb terminals we threw away a decade ago. Some metal boxes. A dozen Windows 97 system CD-ROMs.

"Christmas comes early," I mutter.

"Yes, we can't just throw shit away, can we?" replies Maudie.

There's enough there for a potato each

Another day another gaggle of superannuated yahoos traipsing through the office brandishing tape measures.

It turns out that this group is doing an audit of the council's storage space. I suppose it's lucky that we'd just received this month's meagre ration of new books plus another batch of "Book Off" books for to be distributed around the schools of the borough.

If you learn nothing else today, learn this: if you ever go backstage at a bookshop or a printer's or a library, don't say: "Ooh, what a lot of books!"

And whatever you do, don't say: "I'd be spending all my time reading the books!" You won't be getting the response you'd get from the publican you accused of drinking all their stock, but you won't be expecting it!

The Rough Guide To Ways Of Avoiding Sleeping With Sheep

"It seems strange being in the midst of March and having the fire exit corridor empty," I say to Noreen.

"Have you not been in there today?" she asks.

So I had a look.

"What is it?" I ask.

"We're hoping it's a piece of furniture."

Slinging the mince pie up the lavender passage

The spending freeze is starting to bite. For the first time in recorded history there are less than a dozen boxes in the fire escape corridor without there being a fire inspector on the premises. In fact, there are so few of them they could be stored in the dispatch room, but for the arrival this morning of a load of Confidential Waste bins.

Could it be that T.Aldous is going to clear his office before retiring?

We passed upon the stair

The good news is that we've lot of new books coming in for our libraries, particularly for Carbootsale Library, which may be opening very soon.

The bad news is that we've got seventy-two boxes of books in the fire escape corridor.

The good news is that after a fire inspection report we'll start storing incoming boxes in the dispatch room, where they should have been going for the past two decades.

The bad news is that it's all a bit academic really: the book fund's been frozen 'cos the council's skint.

I want to give it you babe but I can't get it down from the wardrobe

Month seventeen in the Big Brother House and things have gone a bit quiet on the rearranging the furniture front...

It has been noted that there are still boxes in the way of the sofas we haven't bought yet. Which is just as well as they couldn't go there anyway because Maudie and Maisie haven't been able to move their desks to the alloted space because that bit of room is still chock full of the desk that's been appropriated for piling up the spare paper left lying about by Mary and T.Aldous. Oh, and the correspondence trays. And the boxes of paper. And... oh you get the idea.

We still have a pile of old new stock in boxes that haven't seen the light of library. There are constant complaints from Librarians that there is "too much stock." Some of the same Librarians are blocking attempts by Mary, Frog and Bronwyn to allow loan packs to teachers. And there are stirrings that "we need to stock edit" the stock that Mary, Frog and Bronwyn are trying to loan to teachers.

Noreen says:

"I don't know why they don't just cut out the middle man and have us rip the title page out and put the stock straight into book sale as soon as we've received and paid for it."

I shall plant a union jack

Noreen surveys the serried ranks of boxes in the fire escape corridor with some dismay. There are eighty-four of them. At the beginning of the week there were only sixty-eight.

She beats herself up for no especially good reason. The Acquisitions Team are a pretty efficient machine given half a chance and their throughput is quite impressive. Unfortunately, they're under-strength at the moment and for the foreseeable (for reasons we won't go into but prayers have been said for the person involved) and we're now well into the special bulk-buys for the new school term season.

The situation has been ameliorated more than a little by Frog and Bronwyn cooking up a little wheeze whereby all the "Book That!" books went directly from the Acq. Team to the intended children's centres in the Catty area, completely bypassing all the usual bottle-necks and boomerangs in one fell swoop.

Stock footage

T.Aldous is in a bate about boxes again. Largely because they're in the space where he wants to have two sofas and a coffee table so that people waiting to see him can feel nice and comfy.

The boxes "belong" to the Assistant Librarians and they're full of books that either need transferring to another library, transferring into the reserve stock collection, replacing with new copies or removing from the catalogue completely. T.Aldous is annoyed that they've been there for months. This isn't strictly true: there have been boxes in that area for months but they've not been the same boxes throughout. T.Aldous, like most of the rest of our management team, has no concept of dynamic process or throughput.

For years we didn't stock-edit our shelves. In part this was because the Stock Editor, Monsieur Eddie Gravy, didn't get on with the Assistant Librarians. But mostly it was because T.Aldous' predecessor saw the inability to jam another book onto the shelves as a signal to his professional virility. (The remaining stock we have from his time all have broken spines.) When Eddie left there wasn't anybody around to officially stock-edit any more. Some of the library assistants took it on themselves to do the necessary, weeding the lame and unloved out from the overstocked shelves. They got a bollocking for their trouble and went back into their box.

Of course, while all this was going on T.Aldous negotiated a rise in the book fund. Which should be A Good Thing in a public library. Unfortunately, while we were meeting our performance target of 50,000 new books per annum we weren't doing anything about either removing 50,000 items off the shelves or getting additional shelf space. Quite the reverse, in fact. We clung onto the old stock and reduced the amount of shelving in nearly all our libraries.

Which is why Windscape Library didn't have any children's books less than three years old on their shelves. All the new stuff was in boxes in the back room.

Bronwyn has been in post a year now and she is starting to see some headway in all this. Unfortunately, a massive stock-edit of our libraries means that there is a hell of a lot of stock to transfer to another library, transfer to reserve stock, or get rid off. And this takes time. Especially when the Assistant Librarians at Catty Library send their stock over to Helminthdale to be sorted because they "are too busy to do it."

Oh, and when the Chief Librarian insists on vetting the stock to be chucked out and put into book sale.

"You can't put that into book sale. We bought it in 2001 and it's never been issued. What will people say if they see that?"

Perhaps they'd say it's precisely the stock that hasn't issued in eight years that should be removed from the lending library stock.

A very good starter kit for the youngsters

A missive from the Major:

"I’ve worked here for years and things still delight me. Down in the basement where I was checking on the installation of a new fire door (oh yes) I came across these wonders.

"That’s a cart loaded with house bricks which have been wrapped in brown paper and sealed with sticky tape. I wonder if your escape committee could make use of these props."

I quite envy them. We'd love to have a cart loaded with house bricks wrapped in brown paper.

Ready for decanting

Maybelle is in Full Naval Figurehead mood.

"I am determined that they make some kind of binding decision about those battries so we can get that stuff out of the boxes and onto the shelves, available for the public."

I have mad unrealistics dreams, too. Some days I fantasise about being faster than a speeding bullet and leaping over buildings in one bound.

Book another series of "Take It From Here" and give Geraldo his own series

A box of CDs, donated by a customer, arrives at Bronwyn's desk. Quite a nice collection of light classics and easy listening. It's placed on top of another box of CDs, this time quite a nice collection of light classics and easy listening that have been sitting in a box in the librarian's room upstairs in the lending library for a couple of years.

"Doreen and Julia reckon that classical music CDs don't go out," explains Brownyn.

"Is that because they're always stuck in a box in the librarians' office?"

Just the sort of thing we don't talk about any more

Kevin the van driver wheels in a startling number of boxes and dumps them by Frog's desk.

"They've been sent over by Catty Library," Frog explains. "Apparently they've got too many tiny readers rooks and they say they don't have time to sort them out themselves."

I'm not sure what Catty Library thinks we're all doing over here but I think it involves doing sod all while we wait for them to send more work for us to do for them.

"I thought stock-editing policy, such as it is, is that the librarians do the editing and transfers for their libraries," I say.

"Oh it is," agrees Frog. "Except for Catty."

Best sellers

Bronwyn's investigating the latest batch of boxes to be sent in by Catty Library. They're all best-sellers, either from the Orange longlist or Richard & Judy's Bookclub. Each one has a handwritten note inside:

"We already have a copy of this."

A quick check of the catalogue shows that each and every one of the copies left behind at Catty are on loan.

I can't imagine why, after a superb refurbishment, complete stock refresh and lots and lots of publicity in the local rag, Catty Library's issue figures still aren't as good as they were before they closed.

Bombarded by watermelons

"What the hell are all these boxes?"

exclaims Bronwyn.

It's a pile of crap from Catty Library.

Return to sender

T.Aldous has had a right dig at Lola about the boxes piled round the Assistant Librarians' desk. Lola is dead narked.

"Don't worry about it," says Salome, "I've had him and Doreen on my back about them all week."

"Let's get shut of the bloody things," says Lola. "What's in them?"

"All that stuff that they brought over from Catty last year."

Last year, when Catty Library was closed for rebuilding works, the Assistant Librarians reluctantly came over to lend Salome a hand (Lola was on maternity leave at the time and we've been carrying a vacant post for a year). What actually happened was that they sent over boxes of stock to be transferred between libraries; tatty old books to be withdrawn from stock; and assorted crap. Then they pretended to be working on this stuff in lieu of actually doing any work. When the time came to re-open Catty Library they decamped and left all this shit behind them.

"That's sorted then," said Lola and Salome.

And they taped the boxes up and sent them back to Catty.

If you multiply a gallon of pitch by a quart of periwinkles, what is the result?

For most of the past year Salome's been the sole Assistant Librarian for this half of the borough: no provision's been made for replacing Bronwyn now she's Book Sale Coordinator (despite her having spent last Spring being made to work a four-month notice period!); Lola's maternity leave wasn't covered; and to make things worse, one of the Counter Supervisors' posts has been vacant for a year. So things have slipped a bit.

It's made even worse because she's also been asked to take a lead on a couple of pieces of work. She's also been asked to work with me on part of the web site project, which is frustrating because I know she'd have useful input but we both know that she's not got time or space to do much about it.

Just to twist the knife a bit, T.Aldous is now in a bate because there is a pile of boxes in a meeting room that's going to be used for a corporate directorate meeting in March. Some of the boxes are the stock that wouldn't fit when Doreen got rid of a pile of shelving in 2007. Some is stock from Noddy and Glass Road that the librarians from Catty and Umpty should have dealt with but sent to Helminthdale last year. And some is the result of Mary's sending a memo to all libraries a couple of weeks ago telling them to send their old books for Catty Library's Big Book Sale to Helminthdale because Catty Library insisted there wasn't room for any of it there.

T.Aldous has told Salome to get her finger out and get them sorted. Salome was marginally more polite than I would have been.

Chatter

Frog and I are trying to forget that we've bumped into the pile of Chatterbooks boxes in the corner.

"Aren't they all too old to go on the shelves?" I ask.

"It's not the books themselves, just the goodies. I can't remember what's in them: probably flash reading cards featuring Titch and Quackers," replies Frog.

"Not many, are there?"

"These are just the samples. I live in fear of some Herbert ordering a batch of them and not telling me about it until they arrive in the doorway."

"Shouldn't we cover them up?"

"I'll find a blanket."

On hearing the first cuckoo of spring

"The box fairy brought them," says Noreen.

Green shoots of recovery

Spring is on the way...

...after three months of lean pickings for the Acq. Team there are now sixty-two boxes waiting for them to deal with in the fire escape corridor.