By the great horned spoon!

The fire escape corridor is empty.

As I lay gasping for air I asked Noreen what had happened.

"We've done them!"

"What? All of them?"

"Yes."

"But what about the annual last-minute visit to buy up the stock nobody else wanted?"

"We're not doing one."

"You're kidding me!"

"Counting the stuff that's on order that should arrive in the next week or two we've hit all the targets we have to."

I am astonished and ask Bronwyn for confirmation.

"Oh yes," she says. "The Library Service has had all year to get stock ordered. They didn't bother over the summer and we're not going to kill the Acq. Team by dumping a pile of invoices for books we don't really want on them to do in double-quick time to fiddle the statistics. If we've not hit targets by now then it's just hard luck."

Bravo. Even so, I can see Bronwyn having a few fights about the subject with certain people over the next couple of weeks.

Originally used in Odeons in 1956

Daisy Duck has scunnered herself. Despite all entreaties to common sense, she's gotten into the habit of chatting up the new young library assistants to find out the age of their mothers.

Well, she's devastated and serve her right: she's a year younger than one of them.

Contact

It's easy to be cynical...

I've got this old-fashioned ideal of the public library service: the university of the common man; the community knowledgebase; a beacon of information literacy, that sort of thing.

We're having the official re-opening of Catty Library next week (not sure which day: I can't be arsed going to the Catty Examiner's website to find out). We've lined up a celebrity to do the honours; we know it's not Mabel Constanduros because we asked. Other than that, no details have been vouchsafed to staff away from that library.

Except the invitation list, which has been sent down to Maisie for her to send out the invitations. A bit late, given that they've had a year and more to come up with a list, but that's par for the course round here. What is remarkable is that fully one quarter of the invitation list consists of names of people whose address is either "Catty" with no further details or "Address not known."

"How can I send an invitation, with RSVP, to 'Monseigneur Eddie Gravy, Address not known'?" asks Maisie, not unreasonably.

To his credit, T.Aldous has been making sincere efforts not to micro-manage his Policy Team and has let Julia get on with the necessary arrangements. It'll be interesting to see how Julia manages to blame him for this snafu.

Juvenile satires

Overheard: Sibyl's on the 'phone taking a Regional Loans request from upstairs...

"...so that's 'The Life Of Sulla' then... Leave it with me and I'll see how quickly we can get a copy... What's that? Sulla? He was a Roman general. No, I don't remember him; I'm not that bloody old!"

Misfed

"Can you get somebody to have a look at that printer? I don't understand why it keeps jamming," says T.Aldous.

A clue affords itself. Frog has just sent a long report to be printed out. Barely had it started when T.Aldous came out of his office for to go out to a meeting, stopped by the printer, opened the paper tray and took out a handful of sheets.

This despite my having put a notice up there saying:

Do not remove paper from the paper tray while the printer is in use. This causes paper jams and should be avoided.

As frisky as a gay ferret in a pink blender

Overheard:

"We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the grounds of age, race, colour, gender, sexual orientation or ability."

The bald-headed end of the broom

"I'll be asking you to do a letter for me later,"

T.Aldous told Maisie at the beginning of the working day as he left for parts unknown.

"It's quite urgent. How long do you think it would take you?"

"It depends. I can probably get it done while you're out and have it ready for you."

"I need to get some more details. I'll sort it out with you when I'm back."

So he gets back and an hour after his arrival he drifts over to Maisie to tell her what he wants in the letter. Sort of.

"I'll just give Warner a ring to find out what he wants putting there..."

He says, scribbling out a passage of text. This is repeated a few times, including one time when he comes back saying:

"Kara says that Warner likes square bullet points."

One last time he says that he'll need to check on details and disappears into his office. For the next half hour Maisie goes over every so often to see if he's off the 'phone yet.

"Go home," I suggest.

"Oh, I can't leave him in the lurch," replies Maisie.

"But he's left you up Shit Creek. Why are you worrying about leaving him in the lurch?"

"Ooh no, I couldn't."

One last time she goes over to his office and is appalled to find he's gone.

"Did you see him go out?"

"No. He's not been past this way. Has he gone into Policy Team's room?"

Yes he has. And the door's closed with a "Meeting in progress. Do not disturb" sign on the door.

"I'm off home," says Maisie.

Getting silly

Hetty emails me about password permissions at Catty Library.

"... seems not to be able to do as much as the new girl."

I copy the permissions for the two passwords involved and send it to Hetty without comment.

If they've time on their hands I'll have to engineer some work for them to do.

Cheeky

We're all under the corporate cosh about the cost of printing. Not a week goes by without yet another email telling us that our print-outs are being monitored and Questions Will Be Asked if usage is deemed excessive.

Which makes it all the more galling that the Chief Executive's secretary has sent the documentation for the Corporate Directorate meeting and told her that they'll need ten copies of each document so there'll be enough to go round.

Missed matinee

Bugger. I've missed the fun (delayed train: badgers at Umpty). The Gods descended and preceded their meeting by having a tour of the premises with T.Aldous strewing their paths with rose petals.

"You'd have lost your breakfast," says Sybil.

T.Aldous met them at the appointed hour and guided them down to the management floor. Well, those that arrived at the appointed place at the appointed hour. He then went up and fetched the misplaced waifs that had been shepherded towards the precincts of the library by a couple of shopping centre security guards. He also brought along some guy who came over and introduced himself with: "Hi, my name's Bob."

"I think I was supposed to know who is was, and the others seemed to know him so I brought him along just in case. I didn't know him from Adam," T.Aldous told me later.

The meeting room had been kitted out for the six people T.Aldous had been told were coming so there was a bit of a scramble to get another three chairs. Even so, those of us in the other ranks are still wondering why they couldn't have gone into the small meeting room and allowed us to hold the weekly ESOL sessions in the big room as usual. The ESOL class has been told to use the chapel community room on Bendemere Street today. We're looking forward to some of the students turning up anyway to remind the council's directors what "customer focus" actually means.

Chastity

Overheard:

"I've given up hope for Lent."

Vegetable plot

Frog's been doing a class visit at St. Barrabas' Primary School. Partway through his telling the kids a story, a head pops round the door.

"Have we only the one turnip?"

Asks the teacher.

(It turns out that in the past whenever they told the story of The Giant Turnip they wasted a lot of time explaining what a turnip is, so they've invested in the visual aids.)

Gardening

It gets a bit wearisome taking 'phone calls for T.Aldous. Where has he got to now? He's gone upstairs to water the plants in the meeting room...

Dumber than a bag of wet mice

"This is all getting a bit silly now, isn't it?" asks Bronwyn. "I mean, we needed to do a World Book Day display but the rest is getting a bit out of hand."

"Himself's been upstairs telling staff to tidy up the booksale books," says Salome. "'It's the first thing they'll see when they come in,' he says."

"Jesus," I reply. "If that's the first thing we're showing them what does that say about the service?"

"Do you think he'll show them that we've got a choice of milk and that we've got a clock which is really convenient because it tells people when to go up to staff the counter?" asks Frog.

My, how we laughed.

(This is the 2,000th entry in this blog. May the Good Lord save us all!)

Hand-wringing

Maisie made the mistake of going in to ask Mary to sign an order when she was in one of her even-tighter-than-a-duck's-arse-than-usual moods.

"Do we really need two dozen bottles of hand wash?" asks Mary. "Ring round the libraries and find out which ones need them."

So Maisie's spent all afternoon ringing round the libraries to find out which ones need them.

Which is why she's ordering twenty-five bottles of hand wash.

Waiting for the vaulting horse

Bronwyn's put her foot down.

She and Frog have been doing some displays in the library (entirely coincidental with, well you'll get my drift). There are a couple of stuffed toys that Mary hates with a vengeance so they've been sure to include them in one display.

Bronwyn has, however, drawn the line at including copies of The Colditz Story, The Wooden Horse and The Tunnel in the World Book Day display. We sneaked them in twice and she sneaked them right back out again.

Shufflin'

More set-dressing for the Corporate Directorate's visitation...

Sat at my desk doing what they pay me for I heard a lot of scuffling and rummaging just round the corner. I looked round and there was T.Aldous, rearranging the rubbish in one of the bins so that it didn't detract from the artistic excellence of the visioning board.

Glancing away, I caught Maybelle's eye. She had the most graphically-epxpressive "what the fuck?!?" expression I've ever seen written right across her face. We both spent the following five minutes biting pencils as we worked so that we didn't laugh out loud.

Typography

If you ever wonder why we never come to anything: Policy Team spent half hour last night discussing lettering that they're printing out onto A4 paper and cutting out to go who knows where, presumably in preparation for the visitation by Corporate Directorate.

The lettering has now retreated back into their room and probably will now never see the light of day again.

Kinder, kinder, kinder...

'phone call from Catty Library.

"Has the new girl got a more powerful password than the rest of us?"

"No. It's a copy of the password I use as a template for all of you."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"That's all right then."

Sigh...

Their children's library statistics should be better than they are.

Prelude

There's a bit of a panic on within Policy Team because Corporate Directorate is coming over for a meeting at the end of the week, so we must look our best and all have clean collars and well-scrubbed faces.

One particular cause of concern is the visioning board, which horribly accurately demonstrates that we have no vision whatever. Mary promptly prints out some PowerPoint slides sent to us by the Corporate Change Team, or whatever they're called this week, and Doreen is given the job of sticking them up on the board.

"I'm not doing it until after closing time," she protests, "people will just laugh at me!"

Zeuxis was not a comic artist

Someone's been busy over the weekend. The visioning board, which otherwise remains blank, now has a Picasso signature in the corner.

You would be liaible to imprisonment if captured, but your friends could claim your clothes and chest

Been out and about today. Had lunch with a colleague from elsewhere and compared notes. As is too often usual, the stories are depressingly familiar. To be honest, it started to get me down a bit:

"I thought you were doing all sorts of clever things to change the way you worked at your place," I protested.

"Oh we have. And now we've done that it's back to business as usual with fucking big boots on."

"We all go through this nonsense," I sighed, "does anything ever change anywhere?"

"Besides the pay cuts?"

"Besides the pay cuts."

"Actually, we have got one change."

"Oh yes?"

"Yes. Any member of staff has a clever idea they can email it to our leadership team for to be looked at. Improves efficiency no end."

"Better ways of working?" I asked hopefully.

"It saves the buggers having to hunt the good ideas down before killing them stone dead. We send them to the execution chamber directly."

On the way back I'm appalled that the only difference between us is that he's actually done this analysis.

Digging in

Bronwyn's trying to avoid the usual last-minute panic buy of any old stock that's on the shelves at the suppliers at the end of the financial year. She reckons, sensibly, that the targets that have been set are pretty irrelevant as they're arbitary numbers decided upon by Policy Team without taking into account how many libraries would be closed for months on end. If we hit the government's targets we'll be OK, she says.

This is a brave stance to take in the face of an irrational Policy Team. At some stage one, other or both of us will point out that we don't issue hundreds of books in a panic to each of our borrowers in the last two weeks of March, nor less frog march tens of thousands of people past our visitor counters. If we don't take action about the statutory targets we don't meet, why spend lots of money on stock that we don't want to over-achieve one of the ones that we do?

Eye opener

Passing by Catty Library I am astonished to see a dirty great banner saying: "Big Booksale Here!!!" It occurs to me to wonder how, if we can manage this feat of advertising, we never did similar for The National Year of Reading.

Then I remember our service priorities.

Tapping the admiral

Spent this morning at Dutch Bend Library. It was dead quiet, which is something I'd already picked up from its performance stats.

They've never really recovered from having the staff from Catty Library dumped on them with nothing to do for nearly all last year. A typical bit of library management: you or I would have taken the opportunity to free staff up for training and/or doing additional activities and events in the library; all those things we keep saying we can't do because we haven't got the staff. Julia had nothing planned, which is precisely what they did. Stuck at a loose end, the staff got in each other's way, got on each other's nerves and in the end Daisy and Lettie found themselves spending more time managing the consequences than they were keeping on top of the daily 'to do' list. The results were inevitable but it's still a shock to see it in real life.

And the more shocking because I know that staff here have made three no-cost suggestions for trying to turn things round and all have been vetoed recently by Policy Team.

"It's like some forgotten outpost of a lost civilsation," says Edith, one of the Assistants.

"What's Julia doing about it?" I asked optmistically.

"We've not seen her since Christmas. Mind you, she always knows when somebody's moved something on her desk."

I'm the sort of man who takes a shit behind an oak tree

Poncey as it sounds, I've concluded that I'm at a disadvantage to my colleagues because I don't have somebody like me to talk to. I don't mean the part of me that's a whiny no-hoper, God knows they're legion. I mean the part that can listen to a problem, put it into perspective and then try and make a fist of retrieving something positive out of the mess. There have been a few occasions lately where that's been precisely what I've needed and both me and my work have suffered as a consequence.

I'll have to start talking to myself.

The doctor said that he was dead and might not walk again

Sibyl's made the mistake of looking up one of our local author's website. The author is a "lifestyle doctor to the stars," sometimes turning up on the morning graveyards of daytime television. Typically for a native of Helminthdale, none of the stars he's pictured with have appeared on TV in twenty years and we're convinced a couple of them are dead. A small crowd has gathered round her desk to coo in unison:

"Look at the state of him!"

Lippy is sat in her corner of the empire giggling like a loon. One of the old dears on the housebound library run has given her some chocolates and she isn't coping well with the sugar rush.

Frog sits in his corner talking to a tatty old puppet that used to be a hippopotamus. Rather disconertingly, it appears to be talking back to him.

T.Aldous and Mary are talking about milk bottles, and have been this past fifteen minutes.

Maudie's sat at her desk updating the finance system. Every twenty seconds or so she says:

"Oh dear..."

Working in here is an education. It's certainly given me an insight into what to expect when the time comes for me to go into a nursing home.

I can visualise the cartoon for this

Lots of brass for this one. (Tune after HMHB)

I find them cluttering the stairs
And corners where nobody cares.
They fill that office over there.
They're even underneath my chair.

Any space that's going spare.
That meeting room we only share.
And while I stifle all my screams
Frequently they're in my dreams...

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Coming to the library
What's the first thing that you see?
Orange-boxed in serried rows,
Where they come from no-one knows.

Becalmed, bewildered and bemired,
Ageing bookstock looking tired.
Testament to lending vice.
Pages stained with something nice.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

(instrumental)

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

In the halls and by the walls
And where the friendly postman calls;

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Every day, in every bay
And they just won't go away.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

For miles and miles and miles
They are stacked in messy piles

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Or else sometimes when we can
They'll be in the library van.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Where once there may be ten
There'll be twice as much again.

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

And I turn away and flee,
Thinking: "they'll not follow me."

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

And they go on and on and on...

Tatty booksale books.
Tatty booksale books.

Drapery of the Gods

I told the Acq. Team and Sybil about Ken Barmy's library going down the same "visioning the library" route as us.

"I'll bet they've not got a visioning board," says Sibyl.

"As it happens, yes they have," I reply.

"It won't be as big as ours," says Betty.

"I'm not going to get competitive about it," I respond. (Especially now I know that Ken's whiteboard is twice as big as The World's Biggest Whiteboard.)

"What's our lot actually going to do with that board?" asks Noreen.

"I'll bet Kevin and Frog can soon decorate it!" says Sibyl.

"We are specifically leaving it alone," I say. "Just to make the point."

"Well, they're going to have to do something with it," says Noreen. "Perhaps some curtains. Somthing nice and heavy, velvet with tassels. That would do the trick."

"Just like at the pictures!" says Sibyl.

"And with a safety curtain," agrees Noreen.

Time was I had the monopoly on taking the piss out of Policy Team.

And all because the lady loves rubber knickers

Sybil's looking wrecked. Serves her right, really: she went to see Ken Dodd at the Bencup Astoria on Saturday night and didn't take the proper precautions. We warned her not to drink anything for a day beforehand to to carry a knapsack filled with Kendal Mint Cake but she wouldn't listen.

"Five and a half hours!" she says, "half one we got home!"

"Jesus!"

"Don't get me wrong: he was great. But I'm dead knackered now and I'll bet they'll be wanting me to cover on the enquiry desk."

Give the man his due, he gives value for money!

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.

Get more roomy boots

Every year we have a statutory obligation to add 50,000 new books to our lending library collections. Just like we have had every year for the past decade. We also don't have infinitely elastic walls so common sense dictates that we have to remove a similar amount of tatty old stock and/or get more people to borrow more of the stuff in decent condition. Professional librarians wouldn't need to be told that very often, would they? They'd get on and do something, they wouldn't spend all year bleating that 'all these new books keep coming in and there just isn't the room for any of it in my library' now would they?

Would they?

Exploding spiders and how to make them

T.Aldous is having to speak to the Spadespit Civic Society, who are up in arms at the prospect of Spadspit Library moving into a new Community Centre, also housing a clinic, a community arts venue and a learning suite. Complaints include:

"Why will there only be 48 parking spaces? They'll all be taken up by library staff." (There are two staff in this library)

"People won't want to borrow books when they're waiting to see the doctor."

"People won't want to use the library if it's full of people wanting to go to the clinic."

"There isn't any vandalism at the existing library any more: we've got a new skateboard park in Milkbeck." (Yes there is. And Milkbeck is four miles away, the other side of the reservoir.)

T.Aldous is quite sanguine about the silly stuff as he's checked with me and he knows that the two people making sensible noises are also the only two who are members of the library in the first place.

Resource management

In a nutshell:

"I've got somebody from Human Resources on the 'phone wanting to know how many people work for the Library Service," says Maisie.

"It's not as simple as all that," says T.Aldous.

Calendar tricks

"You need to change that piece on the web site," says T.Aldous, "it's very confusing. It says: 'Catty Library Opening, February 11th 2009.' The opening's in a few weeks. People will find that very confusing."

The piece says:

11th February 2009
Catty Library Opening
Thursday February 26th February sees the official re-opening of Catty Library ...

It was raining and the horse was tired

Just when you think you've had the lot for one week some pillock decides to carry his bike up five flights of stairs so that he can ride it round the reference library.

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."

The Northern Lights are calling me, but I can't say what 'cos this is a family blog

God, is it only Tuesday? I've been Thursday tired all week.

Today's nonsense is carrier bags. We're not allowed to have Library Service carrier bags so we had to blag a load off Sheep City for a reader development event last night. All we could get off T.Aldous was: "Make sure that people know that this is the Library Service doing this, not Sheep City!" Like we've not got the name and logo plastered onto everything that doesn't move, and some that do, already.

Luckily we got funding to pay for a guest speaker, who Frog got on the cheap via contacts with the children's library group.

"That's very expensive,"

says Mary, who can't see a pot of money without underspending it by 80%.

On hearing the first cuckoo of spring

"The box fairy brought them," says Noreen.

Flowers in the rain

Verity's unimpressed. She's just accompanied Julia to a meeting about the new health centre which will be abutting Catty Library.

"They spent an hour deciding which pictures of flowers they were putting on which door."

"Eh?"

"They want to put pictures of daisies on one, tulips on another and daffodils on another. That way nobody will know you're going into the clap clinic."

"You jest!"

"It's not like they won't all cotton on to it: within a week they'll know it's daisies for VD. How ridiculous!"

Saving face

We're going to be doing something constructive at the Spring Into Healthy Living event at Umpty.

Face-painting.

Jack Frost nipping at your nose

Staring out of the staff room window I'm struck by the magical transformation effected by the snow we've had today. The pavement oysters and fag packets and pre-owned chicken Chow Meins of the townsfolk are hidden beneath a fluffy dove grey blanket. Yet again I'm struck by winter's potential to reveal the potential beauty of the place.

A thirty-foot glacier should do the trick.

Shelved

We're selling the old shelving from Carbootsale Library to the Children's Resource Centre in Cattermole Street. The library's closed while we have the builders in so Verity had to go over special to let the CRC people in last Wednesday and wasn't best pleased when they didn't show up. They were then going over last Friday to 'spend all day moving the shelves over to the centre' but got bored after half an hour and toddled off.

Maisie took a 'phone call this morning.

"Is T.Aldous there please?"

"Sorry, he's not. He's got a meeting first thing so will probably be going straight there."

"Can you get a message to him before his meeting?"

"I'm pretty sure I can't."

"That's a shame. It's really important he hears about this before the meeting: the builders have put all the shelving in the skip with the plumbing rubble."

Health and Henry Hall

Mary's deeply put out.

The Library Service has been invited to participate in a Spring Into Healthy Living event at Umpty Conference Centre in March. We could do a display about the huge wealth of healthy living information we have in our libraries. We could boast about the work we've been doing with the local Health Service Trust to make health services more easily accessible, and to even deliver some of them within our libraries. We could make a pile of healthy living and self-help books available on the day. We could encourage people to get a bit of exercise and walk down the road to Umpty Library to receive a big smile and lots of library services.

Or we could decide we're doing a Teddy Bear's Picnic and then sulk because a nursery school beat us to the offer three weeks ago.

Chairs XII

My God, is it that time of the year already?

Doreen and Julia have spent half an hour badgering Maisie about ordering themselves some new chairs.

Soon be lilac time.

Indiscretion

You know how it is...

There's a networked laser printer in the secretary's office for confidential printing. And there's this multi-functional device in the open office that only accepts print jobs from the network after they've completed a long sea voyage around the Maldives. And then there's people who won't print to the laser printer because the multi-functional device 'prints better.' And those of they who choose to print out the minutes of a meeting about rationalising caretaking cover when they're working on their own late at night and eventually have to go home after the sixth nasty 'phone call from their spouse. And the caretaker who comes in next morning and wonders who left a big printer on all night.

But you're ahead of me, aren't you?

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.

Jenna of the Jungle

Judging by the number of pot plants being put on that shelf unit over there it must be staying where it is for at least a week, then.

Winter wonderland

It's snowing a bit. Not lots and lots and lots, just a bit. We've all got our noses pressed to the windows like puppies at the pet shop.

Will they send us home?

Not much of a hope. Helminthdale Library Service has a 'we never close' attitude that thinks the Windmill Theatre had a dilettante attitude to opening hours. The Town Hall was sent home two hours ago. There's only us and Marks and Spencers open: we keep popping into each other's to give us something to do. There isn't even the lunchtime charabanc of old biddies to clutter up the aisles by the empty sandwich shelves.

We could well have been told that we've been told to go home, but

• If it was sent by email doubtless T.Aldous' email "isn't working" as per usual.
• If the message is relayed by 'phone not only is his 'phone put through to Maisie but she can't pass any messages on to him because he's made it clear he's in conference.

The boiler's blown a fuse at Seanbean Library and they're having to make do by burning book sale items. Luckily, Beryl's a trained fur trapper, having spent six months eating flapjack and beans by the Great Bear Lake as part of her work experience with the Women's Institute.

The Blue Peter rabbit was the only witness

Quite some time ago we had a celebrity visitation which I tried to turn into an opportunity for the Library Service to get a nice discount from one of our suppliers in return for a good PR photo. Unfortunately, despite my begging that somebody take some pictures, the photo opportunity wasn't taken (I couldn't do it myself because I'd been drafted to show the celebrity the reference librarians' computers). Ah well, yet another opportunity gone begging...

I recently asked if anyone had any photos of the library for the web site. Lo and behold...

I'm not bitter.

Loxley Lozenge

Good news: The mobile library van has passed its MOT

Bad news: That means they didn't notice the holes in the floor that have been covered over with cardboard

At what speed will the tiger be travelling when he can stick his head through both holes at once?

It's taken me too long to realise what's up with me this week...

Every public library in the country provides internet access to the public via The People's Network. Which is actually a couple of hundred local solutions under the same banner. And a real pig of a project for the systems people involved (librarians + library management + corporate IT + set deadline for delivery = sheer bloody murder). It was not fun and, if I were blogging at the time, (a) I'd be down to a quarter of an hour's sleep a night and (b) this blog would be six times as congested as it is now.

I'd hoped that was history, done and dusted. But it becomes more and more apparent that history is repeating itself. Except that this time I have no idea what the IT guys are being asked to do or when and no scope whatsoever for papering over the policy holes in the whole caper. Milton's approach to project management on this one is to have lots of meetings and conversations with IT over a series of months and then every so often tell me all the things that we could be doing at some point in an uncertain future. Any questions I have about how we want to manage the new delivery model; what key resources do we want to emphasise on the user interfaces; and how we want the customer interface to work are waffled away.

It's tempting to walk away from the whole sorry mess but it's a dead certainty that it'll be my job to wave a magic wand and make everything better.

I want to see you there behind me leading the way

"Set aside next week for working on the People's Network," said Milton last week. So I did. And we have done Jack all on the People's Network. Oh, to be sure we

• Looked at the new bookings management system that's been installed.
• Looked at a new PC.
• Talked a great deal about what we could do.
• Listened to the installation engineer as he offered to help us set things up.

and have done Jack all. I couldn't work with the installation engineer to set anything up because I don't know how Milton wants us to be using the People's Network in the future.

"We'll go through the manual and see what settings we want," he says.

"We will decide what we want the system to do in practice and then find out how the system does it," I insist.

All in all a dead wasted opportunity. The installation engineer's been and gone so I'm on my own now with the sure and certain knowledge that some time in the future I'm going to be required to pull a dead rabbit out of a hat.

I think mauve has the most RAM

email from Umpty Library:

"That PC in the reference library is playing up again."

I can't even be bothered to make a guess as to which and what.

We gave articles on peculiar punishments in the fifth volume

Last summer we were told that all new staff would be receiving a Welcome Pack not dissimilar to that we give to the Poor Bloody Public. Last autumn, the staff who'd been tasked to do the job delivered the goods. At Christmas Policy Team decided that all staff starting from the new year would receive packs.

Job well done.

Maudie and Maisie have had a pile of packs printed out and they arrived today. They look very good. Unfortunately, T.Aldous spotted them and threw a wobbler.

"Why don't I know anything about these? You should check with me before doing anything like this. I am the service head and I should know about this!"

Maudie and Maisie are not impressed.

• T.Aldous chaired the staff meeting last summer where it was announced that these would be done.
• T.Aldous chairs Policy Team.
• The operational minutiae that T.Aldous doesn't know would fill volumes.

Still, we can't go around having positives littering the place now, can we?

Now, Umslop, cease to be haggard!

"You've already emailed me those figures," says Mary.

Have I?

"Bloody hell," says Frog, "we're not one of the authorities who haven't submitted their reports and costings for Book Off. I don't remember doing it."

The Library Service has worked its magic: we are reduced to mere unknowing automata.

Landscapes of clouds

How long have we been rearranging the desks on this floor? It feels like forever but it's probably only been about ten months. Since Christmas, four sets of shelving units have arrived, been set up and then departed from the space across from my desk. That's the fifth table over there (and we've not even had one of this week's arrivals yet). Maybelle and her desk are now in their fourth location of the month. Bronwyn's moved over to the position agreed with Mary last summer and is waiting for a 'phone point to be installed. It could be a long wait: Nancy's been at her 'new' desk for five years and still doesn't have one. And if I hear Mary say to somebody: "We'll just put that there for now" one more time I shall scream.

This afternoon's to do is a squabble in Nancy's team about the positioning or not of a desk. Milton passes by and takes it on himself to point out that if they had the desk in the appointed place then they'd need electricity and network points installing on the nearby wall.

Ten minutes later he escapes.

"I thought you were unnaturally quiet," he tells me in passing.

Rules of cataloguing

People at Catty Library are getting a little silly. I'm making a huge effort not to go in with both feet studs first but it's a struggle. And I know I'm not the only one. Since the library re-opened they seem to have spent all their time letting other people know that they don't think they're doing their job properly. Sometimes they'll ring a library and ask: "why haven't you done...?" Sometimes they'll print screen dumps of mistakes they think other people have made on the system and then send them in to members of Policy Team with notes like:

"This is the sort of entry that ... is making. Is this what we should all be doing now?"

I'm under orders not to quality control Catty Library's throughput as it would just be throwing petrol on the fire.

Today's gem has been sent to Mary. It's an old, rather foxed, hardback novel with the note attached:

"This is on the catalogue. It needs doing properly."

Now, it's quite true that we have copies of this book in stock and on the library catalogue. It isn't true that this book is on the catalogue. It was donated to Catty Library by one of their customers and they've passed it on here in this graceful manner for it to be dealt with somehow or other.

Given the to-do the other week I'd guess they'd create a little if it were sent back to them for their shelves.

Please remember the grotto!

Catty Library's been re-opened a while now and we're still to be celebrating the New Model Library.

"Have we got any events going on at Catty yet?" asks Frog.

"They're having a book sale," I reply.

"Don't take the piss, it's not nice."

But it was true.

Tables II

The boys are back with the stuff from Carbootsale and Catty. We can no longer be surprised by the boxes of rubbish they couldn't be bothered chucking out themselves, I guess. The five tables come as a surprise. Especially as two of the tables from down here were stolen earlier in the week to go over to Catty for some reason despite them saying 'No room! No room!'

"Where are they going?" I ask Alwyn.

"Two of them are replacing a table in the staff room," he replies.

I keep well out of the way.

Looking at the Rubicon and then going home just in case we've left a window open

Two senior managers are still sulking about batteries. A couple of grands' worth of stock is now into month fourteen of sitting in boxes in a back office. Thus are great empires forged.

Fog arranged tastefully in mahogany display cases

Maybelle is Not Happy. In fact, her body language says: "I'm fucking well not happy," which is notable because she can usually present as being calm and can-do. I'm a little puzzled as she's working on a set of display boards, which is something she usually takes in her stride with obscene ease. So I drift over to be nosy...

"What's the display for?"

"Next week's 'Equality Plus' day at the Town Hall. It's an opportunity for the public, particularly from minority groups, to come along and be told by councillors what a good job we do of treating everyone equally."

"So we're doing a display?"

"All the council's services are doing displays. Mary told us about it the other week and asked Nancy to take a lead on it. Nancy took a lead on it by saying to me: 'Maybelle, you're good at displays, can I leave this with you?' and then she did."

"What's the brief?"

"There isn't any brief. I was just given a box of leaflets and bits of paper her team have laminated and I've been told to put a display together."

"Err... are those the materials she's provided."

"Yes. Horrible, aren't they? I'm not going to use them. The problem is, I don't know what I should be doing with any of this."

"What's the key message?"

"The key message is: 'I don't know why I'm doing this.' Do you think I should collar Mary and Nancy again and try and get them to tell me what the working brief should be?"

"I think you need a cup of tea."

"Yes, I think that's more like it."

Tables

Seth and Alwyn have gone out with Kevin the driver to pick up some stuff from Carbootsale and Catty libraries to come back here.

• Carbootsale is closed for redecorating and perhaps knocking a wall down (we're still not sure whether or not that's happening, though it may fall down of its own accord once the wallpaper's removed). All of its stuff is going into storage, we're told. Which is why two vanloads have already come back here with more promised.
• Catty's only just re-opened and they've been unpacking stuff from storage and refusing to admit anything else whatsoever through the doors, so God alone knows why they're sending stuff back here.

As the boys pootle off I can't help hoping that the police don't see them. The picture of the three of them sat in the front of the van has "Armed bank robbery" written all over it.

The Wright stuff

Walking back to work this lunchtime something caught my eye. Was it a bird? No, it was an aeroplane. I was surprised that I was surprised, after all they're ten a penny in the skies back home. It came as quite a relief to see that it was a real Boeing thingy with jets and all (the Major will have ID'ed it immediately).

I felt disappointed that it wasn't a Vickers Vanguard. Or a Supermarine Sea Otter, come to ply the flying boat trade amongst the ratty banks of the river Helminth.

My horse will run out of hay

Last year the council upped the parking rates for staff as part of its encouraging-green-living-and-nothing-to-do-with-the-budget-deficit programme. It has been a huge success: the staff car park's been half-empty; local pubs and bingo halls have been complaining about the effects of all-day parking outside their premises; and the council's income deficit on car parking charges has gone up from £110,000 to £243,000.

Next week: how to stimulate the economy of an area of special deprivation during a recession by cutting the salaries and allowances of the largest group of people who live and work there.

Pop in the slot

Fred Anonymous writes:

Further to our earlier correspondence... (-:

We hadn't realised that when our beloved leader motioned towards our new 'visioning board' that the most visible thing on there was a photo of a naked Santa shovelling snow. We'd forgotten all about it. One of the managers said to me afterwards that it was difficult to keep a straight face:

'She was banging on about a visioning board and all we could see was this bloke's bare arse.'

Lap dancing

We're planning on buying some new laptops for staff training and public learning purposes. Officially we have to buy all our hardware from the IT Section. Also officially, Corporate Procurement advises that we may want to look in the catalogue of a well-known high street store. The reason being that it's £2,000 each cheaper to buy them that way.

If we buy the laptops from IT we're allowed to plug them into the corporate network. We have no need to do so: staff will be working with USB sticks and we wouldn't want the public on the corporate network in any case.

The clincher is that if we buy from IT, as well as being more expensive, they disable the sound card and the wireless network functionality. Not really what you want on a learning resource in buildings served by the council's new town-centre wifi hotspots.

Doing da lingo

Ah... the natural reserve of the English.

I'm away from the office attending a sequence of demos and presentations of bits of library technology. In the middle of one of them it's left to the South African in the room to point out:

"There's no such thing as UK English. That's English. By definition."

Yet I am longing to share the lot

I get an email from Catty Library saying it's OK for me to put them back into the stock circulation system. And about bloody time, too. So I leave it for a week and then email Catty Library asking them if they want me to put them back into the stock circulation system.

"Oh no!!!" comes the cry. "We've no space for the stock we've got, let alone any incoming from other libraries!"

And I make sure to copy the correspondence to Julia.

Just in case.

I'd learned enough grass snake to order lunch

Today's favourite staff room riddles. The spirit of the Christmas cracker lives on.

What's brown and sticky?
A wireless nunchuck.

What's blue and wavy?
A wave.

What's brown and smokes a pipe?
Stanley Baldwin in a pan of Bisto.

May the good Lord help us.

You are the audience, I am the author, I out-rank you

I get a message from a colleague who prefers to remain anonymous

"Can I be Fred Anonymous?"

Whose blog is this? No you can't.

Our beloved leader was walking some senior managers through the homestead when she stopped in front of the staff noticeboard and said:

"I'm going to clear most of this stuff off the noticeboard and we'll turn it into a visioning board."

Unfortunately, we're all of an age now where bladders and pelvic floors aren't as strong as they used to be.

I know somebody who makes me feel seasick

Maisie passes on a message:

"Sissie says that she's rung the Helpdesk to report erratic email."

"'Erratic email'?"

"Do you want to ring her to find out what she meant?"

"I do not!"

"I didn't think so. I wasn't in the mood to ask her either."

Eating vinegar off a fork

Every year the same dance. Beginning of December I start asking Mary what she needs setting up for next year's stock-buying budgets. And every year she doesn't respond until the Acq. Team have accumulated a couple of dozen orders for titles due out in April.

And we wonder why we get the bin-end deliveries.

How to cook bacon in a Corby trouser press

Milton gets a 'phone call fom a colleague in Saltgate.

"You've got a couple of people from your Corporate Development Unit coming over to have a butcher's at Chatelaine Library. Is there anything in particular you want us to make sure that they see?"

This comes as news to Milton.

And a considerable shock to T.Aldous.

The good news is that Milton has the sense to answer the question, hopefully in a way advantageous to us.

As much existence as the City Griffin

We're a bit thin on the ground today. As per bloody usual. Today's additional strains have been caused by a pile of people getting man flu and a couple of snow casualties (a break and a sprain). We'll soldier on, like we always do.

Like we've any other option: we daren't close the doors anywhere and we've done a damned fine job of demonstrating that even if we had more staff we'd not do anything productive with them.

Sh-boom, sh-boom

Walking down Helminthdale High Street I noticed the tell-tale row of small cylindrical holes in the pavement that tells me that the Gas Board has been looking for leaks again. This is worrying. We've not had part of the town centre blow up for a few months now so we're about due and I really don't want to be on the scene when it happens.

Nature abhors a vacuum

Doreen is cross. And not without reason. A couple of weeks ago she finally regained the use of the community room in Helminthdale Central Library after months of its being the repository for boxes of stuff from Catty Library, not to mention sofas and kinderboxes. And boxes of leaflets for national reading campaigns that finished half a generation ago. And broken flipchart stands. And... well you get the picture. Anyway, the room was finally emptied of crap and could be made available for public use.

Until the arrival of a pile of boxes from Catty that they "don't have room for at the moment."

An insincerity of purpose in the searching

I bump into Ken Barmy in the coffee shop of Hannigan's Truss Boutique and we get to swapping stories about our respective employers. As you do. Talk had drifted to Pay & Grading reviews: like most everyone we've found that our corporate human resources departments are proposing to make substantial cuts in the salaries of middle-ranking staff so as to simplify (polarise) the pay structures. Both "professional" and "gentleman" players have been badly affected by this and it leaves managers with a festering mess of a problem.

"Our chief's left no stone unturned in her attempt to demonstrate that we're out of kilter with the national market," says Ken. "She says she had a look at the jobs advertised in CILIP Update but 'there weren't very many jobs being advertised and they all required qualified librarians.' I can't imagine why that came as a surprise to her."

"You're kidding me!"

"OK, I can imagine why that came as a surprise to her, but let's be charitable."

The audience was sent home with the Prime Minister's apologies and a bag of chocolate buttons

To my utter amazement we have suddenly started using some of the technology for the intended purpose! Somebody in one corner of the borough had an idea, shared it with a load of other people by email and, over the course of the past two days we have bounced around a useful set of ideas to the point where it's an identifiable project with identified resources and a plan of action...

"I was thinking... There's a box of children's books in the back room at... that isn't doing very much. Could we..."

"That's an idea. How about if we also..."

"I'm going out to... Could we trial this out there while I'm at it?"

"Could we tie it in with the work... is doing at...?"

"Yes we could. This is brilliant. If I do... we could use that as an opportunity to launch it."

Needless to say...

"I'm fed up with all these emails about those children's books,"

Mary tells Frog. So we then all get the email

This is the last word on this matter.

I will be reviewing this stock shortly.

Between that and the recent complaints on a library discussion list about people using the list for discussion my despair of the English public librarian is complete for the year.

I want my Dada

Some clown has decided to empty his bowels in the hand basin in the gents on the lending floor. At least, that's the story as we first heard it. Sybil explains to the staff room:

"A group of lads went into the gents and watched each other crapping in the sink. We didn't know they were in until they came out."

"We'll have to put a CCTV camera in there."

"Have you considered that it might have been a bit of performance art? We should have a webcam in there."

"Well, whatever it is, Seth's had to clean it up."

Let's hope the Catty Examiner doesn't get to hear about it. All Hell will break loose once they find out we've been at an important art installation with a bottle of Max Strength Bleach.

I don't think the time was entirely wasted

I've spent most of the afternoon at Carbootsale Library. While I've been there it's been full of people:

• Older folk coming in for a chat and a read of the magazines and perhaps to take out a book to read in bed.
• A couple of young lads checking out the jobs bulletins on the PCs.
• A young woman bringing back a book her housebound mum had just finished reading.
• A "little mother," herself not any more than seven, overseeing a troupe of infants in the children's library: six sat at the table colouring in 'picture of the month' sheets; three over in the corner playing with the cars; and another three sat on the floor looking at picture books of tractors with big wheels.
• Half a dozen young lads between the ages of six and ten, most of whom seem to be playing games on the Bratz website.
• Two old chaps checking out the details of the next meeting of the parish council.
• Somebody wanting a bus timetable.
• A bunch of kids wanting to know if loan copies of The Guinness Book of Records are back yet.

And the laugh of it is that by any of the standard performance indicators this is Dead Quiet.

Finishing a tour of "Lilac Time"

I've spent an age listening to the discussions about "why we can't do a junior stock promotion" and I have to say that the more I listen to it all the more I think that its publication would put back the cause of gender politics by a couple of generations.

The Cecil Bs of the 16 de mille

A colleague tells me that they've been told they've got two months in which to spend £100,000 on stock for a library that's not scheduled to open until next year.

A sobering thought: there are some people out there who imagine that this is a rational way to go about business.

Too strong for light work

I keep hoping that it's all a strange, exotic dream but I'm afraid it's true...

I've just heard Julia and Doreen tell the Assistant Librarians that they can't do a junior stock promotion because "if we end up loaning out all the books then there won't be any for people to borrow."

If the private sector carried on in this way there'd be cash-flow problems all round and companies going bust left, right and centre.

Dibbling in the nursery

A colleague tells me that they're having an inspection this week. Good luck to the poor beggar I say. Or perhaps envy, Inspections are always good theatre.

It then occurs to me that we've not had an inspection for more than two years. Time was, we had inspectors coming out of our ears. In fact, I'm not convinced we even had the auditors in last year. Oh we must have done, get a grip Kevin.

It also occurs to me that for the first time in more than a dozen years I can't rattle off the current statutory performance indicators off the top of my head. And what's more, I can't be arsed looking them up. It's not as if we ever work towards delivering to them.

A cold wind from the East

Odd things are happening. Staff are making suggestions about things we can do and although most of them are being dead-batted the same as usual, members of Policy Team are scurrying round explaining to anyone who's not dead yet each reason why This Thing Cannot Be Done. There are further disturbances of the natural order of things...

"Did they ask you about changing those settings on the system?" asks Maybelle.

"Yes. I said I wasn't doing them and please could they think of a better idea," I reply.

"Oooh. And what did they say to that?"

"They took it quite well and promised to have another think."

"That'll be why it's so cold then," she says. "Hell's frozen over."

Slightly boxed

Dagmar lends Verity a hand by supplying some boxes, despite having been instructed to do so by Julia.

"When I was emptying Raccoonville so that we could have the toilets done last year I was told to go scrounging boxes from the supermarket to put the books in. When I asked if somebody could get us some more Julia told me to get some more boxes from the supermarket because they needed them for Roadkill and Catty."

The little people leading such humdrum lives

Big to do. Questions are Being Asked. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails of Assistant Librarians. Library Assistants being swabbed for DNA testing. Twenty-odd staff hours involved in investigation and interrogation.

The crime?

Two tatty books were accidentally transferred to Catty Library, which is Not Accepting Transferred Stock.

We've not done boxes for a bit, have we?

Verity's hard at work packing up stock ready for its being put into storage when Carbootsale Library closes. The boxes are a bit ropey to say the least: Verity's had to tack most of them together with umpteen layers of brown tape.

"I know the storage company provides free boxes but I'd have thought they'd be a bit better than these," I say.

"Oh, they provide brand new boxes. I've been told that I've got to use the ones they used for Carbootsale and Catty because they've nowhere else to put them."

"The bin?"

"Oh no, not when there's quality material like this for them to foist on us."

I wail as one in doleful dumps

There is a flurry of strong language from Lola's corner of the room.

"Why the dockyard blarney?" I ask.

"I've been trying to sort out these boxes of books that have been lying here for months. Some of them have been here since before I went on maternity leave. And do you know what?"

"What?"

"According to the catalogue they're all on the shelves in the library. Someone's just slung them into boxes without marking them as being unavailable for loan."

Which means that last April's statutory returns were an even bigger fiction than I thought. And that next April's probably won't be much better. Damn.

Colourfast

There seemed to be an unconscionable time between Catty Library's being handed over to us by the builders and the library being opened. Nonetheless, we are given almost daily bulletins as to why we should not yet treat it as if it's open for business as usual:

• Please note: do not include Catty Library in stock rotation procedures as it cannot accept any more stock. We have not yet unpacked all the old stock from the boxes.
• The meeting room at Catty Library is not available for meetings due to the amount of stock boxed up in that room.

and so on.

Henry Irving's pissed off because the library's local studies material had been shipped off to Sheep City for safekeeping during the building and Julia's now telling him that it can't go back to Catty Library because "there isn't room." This would be OK but Julia and Catty Library were prominent amongst those sticking in the veto when he wanted to provide a borough-wide local studies service from Sheep City.

Popping in very briefly on my way to Carbootsale I notice that there's a survey form on the staff noticeboard asking people what colour they would prefer for the headers for the shelves.

"Bit late for that, isn't it?" I ask one of the Library Assistants.

"They're going to be done posh."

"You've not said what colour you'd prefer."

"There's no point. Nicki and Sandra have said what colour they want so that'll be it then."

I expect she's right.

If we can bring one smile to one little face someone will have slipped up somewhere

We start 2009 on an uncharacteristically useful note.

Sybil's spent all week trying to get hold of an audio version of Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" for a visually-impaired customer. This isn't the easiest of searches, not made any easier by said customer ringing the library once a day to complain that it's non-arrival is a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act (completely unfounded: we don't discriminate against any self-important tosspot of any kind).

"It'll be just my luck for him to do a WorldCat search or something and find it first time," she says.

"He's online then?"

"I couldn't find it on Project Gutenberg."

"Have you tried LibriVox?"

She did, and lo and behold!

We can jack it in now, we've had the win for the year.

New readers start here...

An introduction to Helminthdale:

There are those who say that Helminthdale is a shy jewel of the English Pennine landscape. These people have been detained under Section One of the Mental Health Act. Helminthdale is actually one of those not-quite brick/not-quite stone towns that pepper the wet bits of the north of England. Like many others of that ilk, Helminthdale suffered as a result of the decline of the textile industries; but unlike others it enjoyed the economic misfortunes so much that it decided to make it a full-time project and holds the distinction of being the only part of the country to have been in continuous recession since 1946.

Helminthdale Council is a unitary authority, which is to say that it's big enough to be bureaucratically otiose but not big enough to have a resource base sufficient to fund its dreams. Add to this an incredibly unstable political environment where three parties with practical ideologies you couldn't separate with a cigarette paper are elected almost on rotation, each spending their time in power dismantling and discrediting the half-formed programmes of their predecessor. Helminthdale Library Service is a very small part of this council and not very highly thought of within the Town Hall.

Although there are times when it feels that we have one library for every twenty-five head of population there are really only less than a couple of dozen. These range from the mighty and majestic Helminthdale Central Library, with its rolling empty acres of carpet and groaning toilets to dinky single-staffed outliers in school playgrounds like Glass Road and Pottersbury Road libraries.

This, then is our scene.

The story so far...

Twisted genius and Chief Librarian T.Aldous Huxtable paused in the doorway to his office, his face an inscrutable mask, picked up from one of our interminable book sales. What was his intent? Would he marshall his troops into tackling one of the myriad issues raised by successive government inspectors? Would he coerce an unwilling Library Service into embracing the white hot heat of technology? Or would he go and count the teaspoons?

Meanwhile, his senior management team, this week called Policy Team but next week who knows, busy themselves in the filing away of the points of pencils so that they reach no conclusion.

Jocasta and Amanda have escaped the clutches of the white slavers and, with the assistance of Orlando The Lucky Rabbit, are trying to gain passage on the first dhow leaving the harbour at Barnoldswick. They are approached by a burly Lascar and as he speaks their blood turns cold with terror.

"I have the National Collection of Thomsons Locals for the year 1996 in my reference library."

Unbeknownst to them, Charles and Daphne have embarked on a walking tour of the Mobile Library. As they sit on the running board eating their sandwiches they witness the grisly ceremony of The Coming of the Fire Inspector and The Hiding of the Paperwork. Traumatised beyond words they lose themselves in the grip of the dreaded licorice.

Chuckles the Clown is dead.

Dressed in his flamboyant outfit of tweeds and brown fustian, Henry finds himself trapped forever in Sheep City, a land almost but not quite our own. Senses reeling from a combination of Well Known Local Characters and Doctor Sigismund Ringneck's Fiery Water he finds himself agape in mute incomprehension as he tries to make sense of the latest dispatches from Policy Team.

Everybody knows the new telephone number for Catty Library because it is pinned up behind the counter there.

Marjoribanks had a body like a Greek God, which he kept in a duffle bag under his bed at home. Did he know the secret of the boxes? Emily stifled a scream as the thought struck her that perhaps the boxes had attained a life of their own and some sinister purpose of which she was as yet unaware.

Joining hands to contact the living, Library Service staff discover (through the medium of Indian spirit guide Tiptoes-Through-Tulips) that the service does have a Communications Strategy after all; though their delight turns to ashes when they discover that Policy Team have decided that it is confidential. Fighting back salt tears of bitter disappointment, they have no recourse but to await the publication of the regular monthly staff newsletter, which appears roughly quarterly so long as there is an R in the month.

Dick Barton, with his three chums Jock and Snowy, have entered the farmhouse in pursuit of Erasmus Stradling, the well-known wart charmer, who they suspect to be behind the smuggling of nuns' bicycle saddles to Red China. Little do they know that Stradling is, in fact, the deadly Doctor Fu Manchu in a fun fur and cardboard viking helmet. Even as they enter the hallway the fiendish doctor's machinations weave a web of terror about them.

Kevin Musgrove has had a 'phone call from the reference library telling him that a customer can't log onto her Yahoo mail because she has forgotten her password and what will he do about it?

How will he escape...?