Elephants and bicycle riders never forget

Frog is a tad nonplussed. He's been running two externally funded reading projects projects (Book Off and Booked If I Know) for the past couple of years. Up until Mary's retirement she held the purse-strings and had to approve all expenditure. Which is why there hasn't been much, as nearly all the ideas he had were "too expensive." He did manage a "very expensive" launch for the projects, involving a performance poet who offered a mad big discount because he enjoys coming over here, but aside from that, nada.

Frog's received a letter from the funding agency today asking why none of the money's been accounted for and asking for a statement of expenditure by 1st April. So he asked Maisie how much money was left uncommited in that budget...

If you see somebody driving a Maserati full of stuffed pink elephants you'll know where he's been working.

Hedging your bets

I'm on the bus to Grimley, going down Tench Road, when I noticed the name of the road that goes down by the car park to The Farmer's Lament.

Edge Lane Street.

Paranoia

Some places are worse than us by a long chalk.

A friend's been retired a couple of years now. He's had to stop having lunch with one of his old workmates as their Chief Librarian saw them together last week and gave the poor woman a formal reprimand when she returned to the office.

I had wondered why, one time I went to visit him, he insisted that we drive thirty miles out of town to meet his colleagues for lunch.

A walrus striking a nonchalent pose

The Head of Leisure is at the Town Hall giving a presentation on the council's new core corporate values.

"Dignity at the workplace is one of our foundation stones,"

he tells the hushed assembly. Stage whisper from the cheap seats:

"He's not actually worked in local government, has he?"

I told them you're a big game hunter

Project management at the work place:

• Somebody asks the library service to do something. (Obviously, if somebody within the library service suggests that we need to do something then no further action is necessary.)
• Policy Team members blather about it awhile in an inconsequential manner until one of them blinks. They are deemed to be Taking The Lead On The Project.
• The piece of work is mentioned to somebody in passing
  • at the end of a long meeting about something else entirely that's got an action list a yard long; or
  • by the photocopier; or
  • by the door to the toilets.
  The work has now Been Delegated.
• Some days, or weeks, later the same piece of work is mentioned in passing, in similar circumstances, to somebody else. A Project Team Has Been Set Up.
• A chance conversation between the two people reveals:
  • they are supposed to be delivering a piece of work;
  • they are supposed to be delivering the same piece of work;
  The Project Has Been Scoped.
• By pooling their resources and making a long sequence of educated guesses they find out that they have about 85% of the information required to try and make any progress.
  The Project Has Been Resourced.
• Any attempt to make up the remaining 15% will be blanked because it requires a member of Policy Team to:
  • make a decision;
  • remember what the decision was; and
  • be prepared to be accountable for it.
  The Project Has Been Fucked.

"We'll be needing staff to take a lot more responsibility in the days ahead."

The first day you're content

It soon happens, doesn't it?

Posy waves a book under our noses.

"I've bought it for the staff library. It's a really good introduction to working in the modern library service."

It's a copy of "Workhouse Life In Helminthdale."

Let's spend the night together

Chronic insomnia is one of the Sunday night rituals. All the rest of the week the pillows on my bed are cosy and friendly. On Sunday nights I might as well be trying to doss down on a granite breakwater.

This morning, at a quarter to four, I woke up with a start from a dream about having a panic attack at work, only to discover that I was starting to have a panic attack about work. I don't know why. It's not as if it's any worse than usual. It's been awful in the past. Every evidence suggests that it's going to be awful in the future. But at the moment it's just mightily irritating, endlessly dispiriting and intolerably wearisome. There's no good reason for my getting worked up about it.

It's the end of day two and the Saxons are having a party

It's Salome's last day today. She'll be doubly missed: she's loud and raucous with a filthy sense of humour; and we're not allowed to fill any new vacancies until April, which is pretty much our usual state of affairs even when the council's swimming in money. Posy and Lola are bracing themselves for a sudden increase in workload, which is inescapable given all the programmes and projects being imposed on us from on high, on top of business as usual. There are going to be some seriously sore heads at the work place tomorrow.

T.Aldous' "end of the month" retirement turns out to be "retires at the end of next week." This should prove interesting as none of us are convinced that he realises he's actually going.

The Albert Memorial doesn't match your eyes

Many of our staff are imbued with the work of Harold Pinter and N.F.Simpson

"What's that Christmas card doing on that table over there?"

"Still? Oh it's that card T.Aldous brought us."

"It's a nice picture on the card."

"Oh aye, it's a nice card but what's it doing on there still?"

"Which card?"

"The one on that table."

"Isn't that the card T.Aldous got us for Christmas?"

"That's the one. It's a nice card."

"Oh, it's a nice card right enough. He told me so every lunch time."

"He told everyone. Every time I came in here he was telling somebody that he'd bought that card and wasn't it a nice picture."

"It is a nice picture, though."

"I wonder why it's still there."

"What?"

"That card."

"It's a Christmas card. What's it still doing on there?"

"That's what we were wondering."

"Nice picture."

"Why hasn't it been thrown away with all the other cards?"

"Perhaps it's a shrine to his retirement."

A boy's best friend is his bladder

Himself is traipsing to and fro to the bins in the back yard with pieces of paper. Excepting those he deposits on somebody's desk. And every piece of paper has a story. To be told. Twice. Or more. And then back into his office. It's rather sweet, really. Or would be if it weren't so very, very peculiar.

So we know that copy of the Library Association Record includes a picture of a children's library that looks like the one we had at Racconville at the time.

And we know that his heart's in the right place with that year-old cutting from the Catty Examiner about the boy with the bad leg.

Yes, I remember the work we put into the review of library membership in 1994. And what happened as a result (I'll leave that one dangling).

Oh, a Christmas card from Shagger Noakes, how nice.

And yes, let's either renew or return the 1988 Rose Grower's Annual.

I can't help it. I'm hooked. Because I know what's coming. I know it must be there. Each day brings it closer.

And today is the day.

The documentation for the People's Network project.

"You can't imagine the hard work and headaches that project caused," he tells me.

I. Can't. Imagine. The. Hard.Work. And. Headaches. That. Project. Caused.

My therapist very quickly got a handle on the hard work and headaches that project caused.

Not a jury would convict me.

Excuse me, have you got your ration book?

One of our Early Years Storytellers has just come back from a session at the Little Elephlops Nursery.

"I must be showing my age. One of the kids came up to me and asked: 'Are you a granny or a teacher?'"

Goodbat Nightman

I bump into Ken Barmy in the marquetry department of Hannigan's Truss Boutique and told him about T.Aldous' forthcoming retirement and his intention to do a bit of tidying-up afterwards. He was thougtful:

"They'll name a prawn cocktail at the Ritz after that man."

I couldn't argue with that.

Stock management for beginners

An edict from on high dictated that we have a small satellite of Catty Library in the new clinic that's opened on Franconia Square. The library provides the books and we seem to have paid for the furniture, too, and the receptionists issue and return the books. T.Aldous and Julia did all the settings-up and then dumped it on Hettie to sort out at the last minute because the librarians who do this sort of development work were too busy doing something or other and I made it extremely plain that no project brief or service outline meant no killing myself to set everything up in the week available after they'd waffled on for over a year.

Hettie did a sterling job of it. To the profuse thanks of T.Aldous and Julia [irony alert!]. Imagine her delight, then, to discover that it's apparently her job to nip over and straighten the books on the shelves, retrieving the ones that have been left around the reception area and putting them all in the right order.

Her ecstacy knew no bounds when she walked in and was told by the bloke who runs the coffee stall:

"Buy a cup of coffee and you get a free book, love!"

Chairs XVI

"You see them chairs?" asks Seth, flourishing towards the contents of the fire escape corridor. "Them chairs were only going to be there for a day or two."

"And do we know where they're going?"

"They're replacements for the new ones that arrived damaged."

"And where are they?"

"They're at Carbootsale, Roadkill, Spadespit and Umpty."

"So they've not come back here?"

"No."

"So that's why these are not going out there yet?"

"Correct. There's not the room at them libraries. Like we've got a lot of room here."

"So... How many chairs actually were damaged on arrival?"

"We don't know."

"So how do we know how many replacements should have arrived?"

"Correct again."

"Oh shit... Are you going to run a charity sweepstake on it?"

"I might do. It depends. We might want to be having one about whether or not he actually does retire before Christmas."

I've got a mackerel in my pocket. It's portable. And waterproof.

The snow has abated for a few days, though more is promised next week (oh joy) so we have now turned to that adornment to the thaw: The Enquiry Into What Went Wrong In The Snow. This is a traditional annual gavotte played to very strict steps. The tempo may vary with the character of the dancers but the steps are religiously adhered to.

1. There's a row in the local papers about the state of the borough's roads.
2. The opposition of the day say it's a disgrace.
3. The governing party of the day says that it was an unprecedented set of circumstances.
4. A press release is sent out saying that the gritters are working all the live-long day and that a huge amount of salted grit is being deposited daily.
5. An enquiry is set up.
6. The opposition ask why the council was unprepared.
7. The governing party says that all due preparations had been made, above and beyond those specified by central government.
8. A working group is set up to learn lessons and make recommendations.
9. The working group never meets.

It's all very traditional and lovely in its way. We ought to advertise it better, I'm sure it would draw in the tourists.

This year the press release said that they were putting out 1,000 tonnes of grit a day. Explaining the preparations that had been made, the Cabinet Member responsible told the council that there were fifteen days' worth of supplies in the Bismuth lane depot.

"The problem is that after the first week we'd used up 8,500 tonnes of grit and we were having to wait for fresh supplies from Cheshire."

Those of you who having been following the budget masterclass will be comfortable with the idea that 15 x 1,000 = 8,500.

When you look at the world, God must have been joking

I was going to ask the world what, exactly, librarians are for. I really am that annoyed. Anyone who has any dealings with librarians will tell you that anything that requires any input at all from them, let alone an actual decision, is such hard work that you might as well give the game up as a bad lot to begin with.

"The People's Network's going to be putting loads of PCs and the internet in all your libraries. What services do you want to provide with them?"

"We're setting up an new library web site. Could you let me have some information about the services you're providing?"

"There's a load of government-funded activity going on in the council to meet the e-government deadlines. We seem to be well-poised to be able to deliver quite a lot with very little extra effort, which should win us all sorts of brownie points with the councillors. How do you want to progress this?"

"We're putting together a few pages of links to web pages that our customers might find useful - children's reading sites; readers'/writers' pages; book review sites, etc. I'm sure you'll have some that you've found useful. I'd be grateful for any suggestions for entries."

All the above have one thing in common: response was there none. If selecting and describing information and reading resources for the public to use isn't the job of a librarian, what are they for? I won't go into the details of the latest disappointment: I love Frog like a brother but every so often he reminds me that he's a librarian.

Having spent most of the past two decades trying to develop and deliver public services using the interplay between librarians and the corporate IT department I suppose I should celebrate that I've managed to do anything at all. I suppose.

An then that's that Tom-fool, taking yet another bit of paper over to the bin. We've finally sort of had it confirmed a bit that he's retiring at the end of the month, which we're assuming is 31st January. We're reckless that way. He is, however, going to be coming back every so often on a voluntary basis to "tidy up a few loose ends." (Warning Doctor Smith! Warning Doctor Smith!)

Noreen asked me to go and ask Julia and Jack Harry how they wanted some stuff bought last year for a special collection cataloguing. The first part of the ensuing waffle involved two librarians wondering out loud whether they should go on the catalogue in the first place.

"After all, they weren't bought from the book fund."

It was left to me to point out that in principle all library resources should be on the catalogue so that people knew we had it and the auditors could see what we've been doing with the money. After another ten minutes of slinging peanuts down the Grand Canyon I'd had enough, pretended they'd answered the question and went away and did what I should have done in the first place.

Let us consider...

Talking to a colleague he tells me that their Chief Librarian retired recently but

"She's still coming in so that she can tidy up her office."

What?!?

"We're looking forward to the row when somebody either changes the locks or asks her to hand over the keys to the building."

Like peering down the slit of a piggy bank

The snowdrops aren't out yet but we have the first hints of Spring. A customer at Spadespit Library tells us that the council's going to be closing lots of libraries.

A God-awful small affair

I've cheered Noreen up, anyway...

Noreen and Betty are dead fed up. There's no orders going out and nothing coming in. There's no money about so we can't buy any books. There's stuff they could be getting on with but they're not sure if they should be doing it or whether it would be worth the effort anyway as nobody would give a monkeys. Noreen is the latest in an increasingly long line of people to say a variation on the old theme:

"I could just come in, sit around doing nothing then go home again and so long as I clocked in and clocked out at the right time nobody would care too hoots."

I had nothing useful to say to contradict this: I've come to the conclusion that I've spent the past two decades inventing pieces of work for myself to do in the futile (and ultimately failed) attempt to stop myself going mad with boredom.

We get a bit more bad news about a lot of confusion and indecision from Policy Group (they've decided to be confused but they're not sure if that's what they're doing).

"Every time I think we've reached the bottom we find a whole new pit to fall down," I complain. "My trouble is that I'm far too optimistic for this job."

"That's the good thing about working with you," Noreen replies, "you're always good for a laugh."

By the way, how is your ping-pong?

Fun at Senebene Library. A lady comes in to use the toilet (according to the district auditors this is the primary function of a public library service). Lucy explains that the light's on a sensor and comes on automatically when somebody goes in.

"Oooh! I can't be doing with that! I'll have to leave the door open just in case."

Lucy manages to persuade the lady that the door needs to be pulled to, for modesty's sake. And for everybody else's sake too, judging by the five minutes of prolonged grunting and straining that follow.

Then the lady starts screaming. Lucy rushes to the door.

"Are you OK?" she asks.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

"Not at all. I'm just worried that you might need help. Are you OK?"

"I am crazy, you know..."

It's all to specification

It's the official opening of Carbootsale Library a week on Thursday. Up to yesterday no invites had been sent out because there's still some discussion about the appopriate wording. Which is to say, they've been written but T.Aldous is witholding final approval because he's not found anything he can change yet.

[Note to the micromanaged: always stick a typo somewhere between lines three and six of your text so that it can be amended. And one entirely-expendable sentence that doesn't quite fit and that you will fight almost to the death to retain before finally giving in with bad graces.]

So like I said it's the official opening of Carbootsale Library a week on Thursday and no invites had been sent out. T.Aldous has been out of the office most of the past week. Julia is in charge of Carbootsale Library and is responsible for all the arrangements and she finally plucked up the courage yesterday to get the invites printed and sent out at the half-past-the-eleventh hour.

T.Aldous found this out today and had Alwyn spending the morning whizzing round the Town Hall retrieving all the invites from the invitees.

The invites have been sent out once again. The difference this time being that the address labels for the councillors have been re-done to include the names of the wards that they represent.

The council is looking for efficiency and cost savings.

Always bring your own laughter, just in case

Oh this place...

"You know, I can't carry on getting up in the morning and coming here,"

says Bronwyn. Bronwyn is one of your no-nonsense, roll-your-sleeves-up-and-get-on-with-it sort of women. If it's getting to her, too, then things must be bad.

Florence comes halfway up your thigh

How to make sure you get more than your fair share of the office biscuits.

Overheard in the staff room:

"These aren't just chocolate fingers. These chocolate fingers have been hand-rolled on the thighs of dusky firemen from the Catbush Road fire station."

Young, dumb and ugly

One of "those" customers in lending today...

A lady came in with her child in tow. He's about eight years old and has every chance of never reaching his tenth. He spent most of his time running round the library shouting at his mother. He ran up to the reference library, pausing only to lean over the bannister to shout:

"Give me my fucking biscuits!"

Bronwyn and Sammi exchange glances when the lady dutifully toddles over and gives the brat his biscuits.

Top comes when she comes to the counter to get her books stamped. The lad goes steaming off on one and has to be persuaded to come back and join his mother. As she hands her books over to Sammi the child starts shaking his bottle of fleurescent fizz around.

"Ooh, you want to be careful there, you'll be spilling your drink. I've had one accident today, I don't think I want another," says Sammi.

So the child deliberately squirts her one.

"There's your books, Mrs.... Do come back soon," smiles Sammi.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have some very professional front-line staff.

I don't suppose you're accustomed to swimming in shark-infested waters

Lola is fizzing. Inevitably this must have something to do with Windscape Library. And so it does...

We've received the forms for the annual survey of the health and safety of our libraries. It's straightforward and common sense stuff - is there an unimpeded fire exit? is the first aid box in plain view? is there a muzzle on the tiger? - which we fill in, send back to Health & Safety and the council's insurance premiums are kept down to the merely exorbitant.

Windscape Library has sent theirs back with no effort at completion. Instead, scrawled across the top in LARGE WRITING is the message:

Lola,
This is unnecessary. I shall speak to T.Aldous about it.

Lola is debating whether or not to send it back with a note saying: "Get this filled in, pronto!" She feels that this may be a little wishy-washy.

Chairs XV

Is it that time of year already? A pile of new chairs have arrived and are stacked up in the fire exit corridor.


But there's no money about.


Ah... these are replacements for the chairs that arrived in November, which are apparently faulty. The fault being that they arrived and were accepted when T.Aldous was on holiday. Seth's been given the job of retrieving the faulty chairs so that a like-for-like swap can take place once the new new chairs have been accepted.

Yer brother's just killed yer kestrel; go and warm up the bees!

How budgets work:

Q: Michael has £5,000 in his furniture budget. He has secured a quarter of a million pounds in grant funding from a quango for to provide a new collection of learning and literacy resources including books and handouts for to support the books. The funding is dependent on his spending £1,000 on furniture for to house and display the new materials in a useful and attractive way, with the necessary bit of branding to acknowledge the source of the funding. What is the nett benefit to the local authority, the library service and the public?

A: None. The Finance Section refuses to let Michael spend his £1,000 from the furniture budget on this furniture as it is not essential expenditure.

Sidenote: The council has just spent £945 launching its new Literacy Strategy.

Hooray!

This year's Hooray For Helminthdale calendars have finally arrived. Uncannily, they're the same as last year's and the year before's....

Snowballs

Any poor, shivering wretch looking to come in for a warm in Helminthdale's libraries is in for a bit of a shock. The heating's off at Spadespit and Milkbeck, though the girls are keeping the service running with layers of wincyette, Red Army underwear and a fund of blue language. At Catty Library the ice in the gutter is stopping that leak in the children's library that somehow missed the snagging when the building was refitted. The school hosting Pottersbury Road Library is closed because the teachers insist on having heating (softies). Roadkill Library's closed because the children's centre that hosts it had a complete boiler failure.

Here at Ice Station Zebra the heating's full on and we're hitting a good nine degrees centigrade so long as nobody opens any doors to try to come into the library. This isn't as often as it might be as customers have to come in via the shopping centre, the entrance to which is a steep downward-sloping ramp of polished vinyl tiling. (Why? The centre was built on the side of a hill and they could have chosen any place for to put an entrance that was level with the surrounding terrain. It was probably the same dozy design pillock who removed all the rough granite setts between the tramlines in the centre of Manchester and replaced them with polished slate, just right for the pedestrian areas in our climate!)

Our senior managers' new policy of active positive engagement with the lower ranks has nothing to do with the fact that their room is five degrees colder than the open office.

"Never mind," says Seth, "it'll soon be Christmas."

Telegramme for Larceny Whipsnade!

How budgets work:

Q: John has £5. He knows that the book that he will buy in February will cost £4.50. In January he buys some apples for 50 pence. How much does John have left?

A: John has overspent by 25 pence. In December the Finance Department identified this as a budget with a projected underspend and accordingly removed £4.75 from the account without telling John that they'd done it.

Which is why Frog and Bronwyn are spending money they haven't got on an author event for World Book Day and not worrying as much as usual about how much it's going to cost.

We'll have to think of something a bit more convincing, won't we?

It isn't one of our good days. In the midst of despair I go and get myself a cup of tea. Frog's already had the same idea.

"Greugh."

"I agree."

"Sigh..."

"It's shit, isn't it?"

Then Frog has an awful epiphany:

"We're just marking time before retirement, aren't we?"

Not a survival biscuit

Helminthdale continues to struggle in the snow. Word comes to us from the housing office on Brocklesbury Road:

"We have put a sign up telling residents that there is no nutritional value in eating snow. Even the yellow stuff."

We are cheered up enormously by this news. Thanks guys!

See me coming down the street with the winning post on my pillion seat

An email from Fred Anonymous, who claims to be snow-blind and suffering from cabin fever:

"I thought this would appeal to your sense of municipal responsibility.

"Like most everywhere, our council's getting a lot of flak about gritting the roads, or lack thereof. Unlike most everywhere, this happens even in the mildest of winters. You can always tell where the council boundaries are: whenever there's even the slightest flurry of snow neighbouring councils have roads in black or grey and we have them in white. And so it is right now, with every road and pavement ungritted.

"Except for one straight line, two feet wide, that starts at the entrance to the council offices where the directors and chief executive work and leads across the road, then across the square and across the road again to the town hall where the councillors do their business."

Famous for dropping pre-packed bacon

T.Aldous appears to be clearing his office.

Leastways, he is removing paperwork from his office and depositing it in the confidential waste bins.

One piece of paper at a time.

Seth offered to move one of the bins to his office. Oh no, it would get in the way of things.

Seth offered to give him a box to hold the paperwork in so that it could be carried en masse to the bins. Oh no, it would get too heavy.

Seth offered to bring one of the bins over, empty the very heavy box into it and then take it away, once or twice a day as necessary. Oh no, that would never do.

So T.Aldous is clearing his office one piece of paper at a time.

Time for the odd-man-out round

Half the shops in Helminthdale have got closing down sales and even the charity shops are struggling. So it's probably not a good time for one of the council's free magazines to be advertising the shopping facilities in the neighbouring boroughs of Bencup and Pardendale.

Theoretically, the people running Helminthdale market could have advertised in said publication but they, like us, have had their already minuscule marketing budget frozen.

If we ever had to go in for sponsorship the council would probably require us to take coin from The North of England Book-Burning Association.

Descriptive cataloguing

A 'phone call from Henry Irving.

"You know the Contemporary Local History Collection?"

"Yes..."

"What type of material would you say gets added to that collection?"

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, forget what's going on at Dutch Bend and Catty."

"In that case... material that's of historical significance or else of lasting import."

"Excellent! Thanks. I knew I could count on you for just the right sort of bullshit for these bloody reports."

Gelid

Frog gave me a lift back to the library after a meeting over at Umpty. As we got in the car we noticed the temperature gauge:

26F Risk of ice

Given the very heavy snow we had to smile. Little did we realise that it was a prophesy...

The multi-story car park in wonderful downtown Helminthdale is an unlovely object: a rotting concrete skeleton of a thing that would be condemned if the Borough Engineer's Department wasn't under express orders by the owners (the council) not to even look at it. To make it easier not to look at it, all the staff in that department have been made redundant and invited to apply for half the number of jobs they started with.

Driving up the steep slope to the entrance it became very apparent that the council's depending on the traffic to do the gritting for them. Even worse, there was a queue, stretching the length of the ramp. The reason?

"Ticket machine's not working. You'll have to walk over here so that I can have a look at your ticket and let you in."

I could sit and count my hair

Bronwyn's turn to cover the Reference Library enquiry desk.

"We had four enquiries. One was: 'have you got a pencil?' Another was: 'can I borrow your pencil sharpener?'"

She is not impressed. Nor, indeed, is Posy who took her turn yesterday. They're both unhappy that they're having to sit at the enquiry desk while the reference library staff sit in the back doing things we know not what.

Especially when it turns out that one of the things they've been doing is typing out "Do not remove from the library" labels and sticking them all over the magazines that we've bought for the family literacy groups to borrow. They were only in the Reference Library temporarily for a month.

And we won't going into the items we've found that they've ordered by 'phone without an official order number; not from the authorised supplier; and to be paid from a budget they wouldn't have even if all the budgets weren't frozen...

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?

Animal magic

Being naturally inquisitive, I asked Ken Barmy about his reference to Johnny Morris the other day.

"When did you ever see any librarians on a David Attenborough programme?" he asked. "It just doesn't happen does it?

"Oh, they had one on "Zoo Time" with George Cansdale but that was a lifetime ago. Besides they had to shoot it because it bit one of the keepers."

I had to go for my bus when he started explaining why Ann-Ann and Chi-Chi didn't get it on down because of a lack of cardigans and leather elbow patches.

Tonight we're going to party like it's 1699

Well, here it is: 2010 and he we are. Hello.

Those of you wondering what this blog is about could do worse than to have a look at this bit. For those regular readers (bless you both), perhaps this is time for a moment's reflection.

Firstly, and seriously, I'd like to mark the passage of those who didn't make it to 2010. I know I've been lucky personally in this regard, though there have been a few times latterly when I've wondered when that luck would run out. Too many of the people I know, either in real life or in cyberspace, haven't been so lucky. Best wishes and sympathy to all who are left behind.

Some of my regular contacts in the blogosphere have gone quiet lately, either here or in their own blogs. I hope that all is well with them and that they've just found better things to do that are both time-consuming and wonderful. You're always welcome back here. You can even throw buns if you want.

And that leaves you, dear reader. I'm still amazed that you keep coming back to read the deranged ramblings of a bitter old man but I have come to welcome your presence. Thank you for your patience.

Whatever happens in the fantasy world of Helminthdale, do have a good 2010, one and all.

What a smashing year

I'm one of those old-fashioned people who start counting 1... 2... 3... so there'll be no review of the first decade of the century this December. A shame, as even a cursory glance would remind us that at the turn of the Millennium our public internet service was a couple of Amstrads on dial-up at 50p a half-hour whereas now it's an easy gross of broadband-enabled PCs available for free and heavily used. Of course, had we relied on the wit and hard work, or any work at all, from our librarians we'd still be on dial-up. I try not to remind myself of this.

So let us consider 2009. We've had worse years. I, personally, have had much worse years. And other people have fared far, far worse than we. Even so, it will be nice to see the back of 2009. Or would be, if only we weren't dead sure that 2010 is going to be substantially worse, what with the budget crisis; the pay cuts; the vacancies freeze; the uncertainties about the management, or even ownership, of the service; and the unyielding promulgation of fresh hells from the body corporate. If it wasn't for the fact that the council's not accepting any more early retirements (on account of its reckoning that it can't afford to give people the necessary pay-offs) half its staff would be packing its bags right now. [Helminthdale Council still wants a substantial number of people to leave the payroll but doesn't want to pay for the wheels to be set in motion. A substantial amount of the 2010/11 budget may need to be going towards servicing defences against claims for constructive dismissal.]

Here in the Library Service it isn't business as usual. This, you would imagine, would be a good thing. Sadly not. We have been to too many funerals this year (one is too many to my mind, but we weren't that lucky) And otherwise, all is confusion. Or, if you're going to pick nits, all is even more confusion than usual.

The big news of the day is that T.Aldous has finally come out and said that he's retiring at the end of next month. We didn't think he'd be outlasting Mary by very long, and lo it comes to pass. In many ways this is a good thing: T.Aldous has been a diligent and hard-working chief but too often his hard work has been either counter-productive or else completely undermined by his irrational need not to be seen to be accountable for anything. The timing, typically of T.Aldous, is unfortunate. There is a lot going on corporately and regionally, not much of which will be to the advantage of either us or our customers. T.Aldous' departure adds a further element of uncertainty, which will be seized upon by somebody somewhere for their own ends. And we're still concerned about Policy Team's ability to up its game, even though we're seeing signs of their putting in the effort. Besides which, it's always useful to have T.Aldous there to act as the lightning rod in times of storm.

Next week, for the first time in years all of our libraries will actually be open. Except for Mattressbrook Library, which closed years ago but which we still supply with school holiday events for no apparent reason. That will be interesting. I wonder if we'll be able to keep the doors open for more than a week or two (yes, the staffing situation is that bad!) And if we do, I wonder if anyone will notice.

Ah well. Have a happy new year despite all else.

Overcommunicating

I receive an email from Ken Barmy. He is having fun at work.

"Arriving back at work after the festive hostilities I discovered that a key part of our library management system wasn't working and that once the effects had worked their way through the system nobody would be able to issue, return, or renew books and we couldn't add new borrowers, that sort of thing. Oh joy. Once I established what the problem was I sent everybody an email warning them to expect problems. Five minutes later, as I was trying to unpick the problem and get the system ready to accept a clean version of the file that had been corrupted, the 'phone calls started.

"'We're having problems with the system.'

"I explained to the first caller what the problem was. The second caller was somebody working at the next desk to the first on the lending library counter. The third caller was the person on the lending library enquiry desk. The fourth caller was another library. The fifth was the person who'd replaced the first person while they went to the loo. After the eighth 'phone call I sent another email telling everybody that there was a problem, it was a biggie, I was in the process of trying to sort it out, it would take time, they won't be able to do stuff because there was a problem.

"The 'phone calls continued. Mostly from the lending library. The only times I wasn't receiving 'phone calls was when I was talking to people in our IT section asking them for backup copies of files, or when I was talking to our system's support desk in the States. Not getting through to me, people starting ringing other people on my floor to tell them to tell me that they were having problems. And just to make sure, they also emailed me.

"I wrote a third, detailed, email telling everybody that there was a problem, this is what the problem is, this is what I've been trying to do in between your ringing me to tell me something I've already told you twice in emails and numerous times on the 'phone, etc. etc. etc.

"Five minutes later I received an email from somebody I'd already spoken to twice. They were having problems with the system and thought I would like to know.

"I resisted the temptation to reply: stap me vittles, I hadn't noticed any problems, you win a Crackerjack pencil for being such a perspicaceous young lady.

"Five minutes later I received another email from them. They had tried again but were still having problems. I steadied my nerves and ignored it.

"Two minutes later I got a 'phone call. Had I read the two emails? Yes, I had. Did I know that they were having problems? Yes, I told everybody they'd be having problems even before they happened and since then I've emailed everybody twice more and you've told me twice before when you've rung me up to say you're having problems on the system. That's all right then. Quite so. Goodbye.

"Three days on, still not sorted. Each day I send at least three emails to everybody, marked "Important: read this!" telling them that there are still problems with the system, what they can do in the mean time and that I will, as always, let them know just as soon as it's safe to go back to business as usual, and don't telephone me to tell me you're having problems with the system as I think I've noticed.

"And every day I receive emails from people who've been receiving these emails, and who've been ringing me up, saying: we're still having problems with the system.

"Johny Morris never had this trouble."

Been to more schools than chicken pox

How being a Professional Librarian works:

If Frog, our Children's Librarian, spends all day sat at his desk cutting out silhouettes of tadpoles this is counted as Work.

If Frog spends the morning visiting three nursery classes, telling the children stories and encouraging a love of books and reading his return is greeted with the words: "Where have you been all day? There's a lot of work needing doing."

"Well worth sitting in all those classes at library school," he observes.

I thought you'd died alone a long, long time ago...

We had rather hoped that the re-opening of Carbootsale Library, which is next week, wouldn't be involving the same nonsense about the telephones as that of Catty Library.

We had rather hoped.

One hundred years ago today...

Ah well...

Aside from Catty's having opened and Carbootsale being very close to re-opening, once we find out what the 'phone number might be, nothing much has changed. Except the job cuts and the freeze on spending and the colleagues who've gone over the wire and...

Spoiler warning: The end of year review will be a bit on the bleak side this year.

One for the Christmas box

I looked everywhere for the original Marty Feldman version. No matter. This will ring bells with anyone who's worked in a library...

Have a good Christmas, everybody!

Spreading straight from the fridge and containing 99% of all known germs

It's the annual pre-Christmas holiday fridge clearout.

Seth clears out the fridge before every big holiday period, which gives him the chance to chuck out the stuff that's starting to glow in the dark or which closes the fridge door after you.

This is always followed by the inevitable whines of: "where's my... I was saving that for later."

Nothing succeeds like success

Reading The Reading Agency's notes from its conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the summer reading game we're amused to find that Estelle Morris has become the "Chair of the Strategy Board at the Institute of Effective Education at the University of York."

Almost as big a hoot as "Empower, Inform, Enrich," the government's utterly-vacuous policy document on public

Politicians live in an entirely different world to thee and me.

Give me liberty bodice or give me death

We thought that there was an air of excitement about Salome's desk over the past couple of days. Today she has had confirmation: she's got another job. All of a sudden, all the stress and tension falls from her and she's been all sweetness and light all morning.

"They've already sent me the training induction plan," she tells me.

"Training induction plan???" we cry in unison.

Such are myths and legends born.

The ghost of Christmas present

"He says I'm going to get a special little something in my Christmas stocking," says Lippy.

"Probably varicose veins," suggests Sybil.

It's called "modern jazz" because the word "crap" was already taken

Like any other up-to-the-minute, go-ahead public organisation with its finger on the pulse of the technological revolution and grasping the nettle of e-government with an almost unbecoming gusto, Helminthdale Council has a staff intranet. Actually, it's had a staff intranet for nearly twelve years now. It's had a useful life of about two months, after which it was decided that it was far too important for staff or services to use and it has since fulfilled the much-needed role of megaphone for the sundry mayfly organisational improvement programmes that have delighted us over the years. Ambition To Achieve; Onward For Opportunity; Strive For Success; Value Through Service; say what you will, our corporate crapmeisters have always had a touch of the Goebbels about them.

The Bobbing Up And Down Team unveiled their version today. We are all suitably overwhelmed and as excited as schoolgirls at a Tommy Steele gig.

The tone is set immediately in the promotional email, which features an intrepid explorer furthering the reaches of man's knowledge and fortitude. We're pretty sure that it's Captain Robert Falcon Scott. The front page of the intranet features a large picture of some bloke jumping out of an aeroplane. Let's be honest now: you wouldn't trust any of Helminthdale Council's equipment to see you across the road, let alone out of an aeroplane. A potentially-productive morning is wasted as staff scour the rest of the site for pictures of lemmings or the Hindenberg.

Highlight of the whole business is The Input Zone: Your Council, Your Forum. Staff are invited to offer suggestions and comments on "what we can do to make this the best council you could be working for."

The Imput Zone went live at 0830. By noon it has been airbrushed from history, as if it had never happened.

Happy days.

Not standing

There's been a very mild relaxation of the spending of the book fund, though only enough to allow paying for advance orders committed in the autumn and for a small number of titles requested by the public (and these only because we charge for requests for items not in stock and we have an income target)(don't get me started on either aspect of that last parenthesis!)

Imagine Noreen's delight on finding that the Reference Librarians have been slipping in orders for titles they didn't include in their standing order list. The copy of "Wilkinson's Directory of Public and Private Organisations" that arrived today accounts for three-quarters of a week's permitted expenditure in one fell swoop.

"People are always asking for it," say the Reference Librarians.

Noreen and Betty muttered something in a similar vein.

Hev yew got yer card, boy?

The Romance of Libraries (after Smethurst)

Oi've gotta girl,
A very nice girl,
Works in the library.
I say: "I love you" to her
And she says: "Shush!" to me.
Oi likes her looks
As she stamps my books
A new date every day.
And as we thusly
Bill and coo
My love will softly say:

"Hev yew got yer card, boy?
Hev yew got yer card?"

Contrary Mary
Stamps "due back first January"
And she's my little library gal.

What-o! Thespians! Enter!

The good news is that we've found the Little Baby Jesus so the Millennium Bug no longer has to act as his understudy in the library's festive crib.

The bad news is there's now some debate as to whether or not having the Millennium Bug as one of the angelic host is sacrilegious.

UHF

Toddled over to Sheep City for a brief conflab with the gorgeous, pouting Henry Irving. The poor old dear's feeling a bit vulnerable in the current working environment.

Sheep City's been taken over by the Leisure Trust and isn't fitting in very well. Unfortunately neither Henry nor Gaynor, who runs the visitor centre, speak or write the standard management bollocks required by the management of the Trust. And both blotted their copybooks badly in a recent meeting where a bunch of highly-paid jagoffs spent two hours in an orgy of self-congratulaton only for Henry and Gaynor to spoil it by asking:

"Well, yes... but what have we actually delivered?"

I'm not sure how much they have to worry. Of course, we always have to bear in mind the Helminthdle factor: if anything's as sure as Lord Ashcroft and taxes there's always the possibility that any senior manager may be a 24-carat dickhead. But it isn't necessarily a given. Bearing in mind that for the past four months the Leisure Trust has been having the kicking of its life in the letters pages of all the local papers while Sheep City is the darling of the media, the management of the Trust might have their hands full as it is without creating any new controversies.

We'll see how things go in the new year. Let's hope it's not as awful as what we're facing, what with the budget cuts, vacancies and business as usual.

The love of an oak tree's kiss

This is Frog's story, not mine, but it's too delicious not to share...

A few years back, Frog lived on a main shopping street and was used to the usual stuff that happens when your front door's available to passing drunks. He'd often come downstairs to find that someone will have had a fit of guilty conscience and let go of the cutlery they'd stolen from the Italian restaurant by posting it through his letter box. Or chip papers. Or half a pizza...

One day he came downstairs to find a huge plank of wood. He sat on the stairs and stared at it for some time.

How in God's name did anybody post that through the letter box?

His wife came downstairs, looked at him, shook her head and said:

"You don't remember do you?"

He'd gone on the Christmas lash with his family and on the way home decided that they needed the wood for a new gate.

A glass of warm blood and they're straight up the stairs

A colleague writes...

"One of my workmates has a wife works for DWP.

"There was a bomb scare and the alarm went off. One guy grabbed a paper knife and ran round the office brandishing it shouting "They'll never take me alive, they'll never take me alive". After a full circle he says, "do you think we should leave now?"

"I'm not giving you ideas or anything........"

Lingua Franca

Maybelle asked if we had any ideas for Mother Tongue Day.

None of the ideas we came up with would seem to be applicable in a public library.

We took a bongo from the scene

Himself is either going on leave or is, as rumoured in the Town Hall, retiring. He's in a foul mood and has just placed an embargo so that nobody can rent any rubbish skips.

Sitting in your bunk with your feet in the porthole

Maisie is being chased for the rent for one of our libraries.

The invoice came last week but T.Aldous won't pay it yet because it's not due to be paid until Christmas Eve. It actually doesn't matter a blind fig to us which day it's paid so long as it's out of this year's budget and we're not either slung out on the street or pursued by another lot of bailiffs but no, it can't be paid yet.

The Accounts Section want it paying p.d.q. as the council's performing badly at getting invoices paid quickly and there are financial penalties imposed by the government if targets aren't met. So once a day they ring Maisie and once a day Maisie tries to persuade T.Aldous to authorise the payment and once a day he says no, it's not due until Christmas Eve and once a day Maisie rings Accounts to say that she's hit a brick wall again.

To add insult to injury, T.Aldous has called a meeting later today to ask Jack Harry and Maisie why we're not paying our invoices on time.

For fox sake

The film version of Roald Dahl's "The Magnificent Mister Fox" is on at the local cinema and there are adverts for it all over the shop. So where are our copies of this book?

In a pile on a chair in a side office with a note stuck on the inside date label of the top copy saying: "For the attention of Frog. Display?"

Unfortunately, nobody told Frog they were there and it was only by chance he found them. Doing our CSI bit (I take a lovely Marg Helgenberger) Frog and I reckon they've been there just over a week.

Sigh...

Smells like team spirit

Wandering through the Town Hall I spot this gem on a departmental noticeboard.

The Departmental Christmas Party has been cancelled.

There will be mince pies at reception. Please help yourself.

You commence with the usual five-finger exercises

It's reassuring to know it isn't just us. At least, I think it's reassuring. Alternatively, I may just be huddled in a corner mewing piteously.

A colleague in another section of the council had been instructed to attend a meeting today. He was told that it was A Very Important Meeting. And that he should Prepare For The Meeting Beforehand.

"It is about departmental matters,"

he was told. Which was good as he might have gone along thinking it was going to be about astronomy or something.

Seeing as it was going to be A Very Important Meeting, and that he should Prepare For The Meeting Beforehand, he asked for the agenda so that he could prepare for it.

"We have all been on a management leadership course and haven't had time to prepare an agenda."

There were twenty PowerPoint presentations.

The pursuit of novelty

The latest electronic missive or epistle from the Bobbing Up And Down Team is a gem:

"It would be a good idea if the Christmas opening hours were put on display in the library."

T.Aldous' response is a classic of the form.

"What an excellent idea. We have been doing this for thirty-five years."

Not the consolation it might have been

The lights in the main stairwell have been out all week. Luckily we are well-versed in groping about in the dark but there is some concern for visitors. The stairwell is the responsibility of the shopping centre we're attached to, even though we still haven't paid this quarter's rent because somebody who will remain nameless has been sitting on the invoice. (Literally)

Maisie rings the shopping centre management to try and get something done.

"We're a bit concerned that it's a health and safety hazard."

"Oh, I shouldn't worry about that: the place is full of health and safety hazards."

We're trying our best to find this reassuring.

Sprites

The day's not starting so bad: coming into work I'm accosted by an attractive young girl dressed as an elf in green leggings. She hands me a stick of rock and a leaflet.

"Look after yours ELF this Christmas!"

it says. I was just about to ask her if I looked like the sort of person who seemed to need a bit of looking after, and was she available for the job, when it occurred to me that the age difference was nearer thirty than twenty years.

Heavy falls of surgical lint in Leeds

Nipping out for lunch I bump into Harvey Cartwheel, one of the council's marketing people, brandishing a camera on the main shopping drag.

"You're a bit keen, aren't you?" I ask.

"We're trying to get together a pile of photos for a branding exercise to get some inward investment into the borough. I've got to get pictures of happy smiling shopping people. You can't imagine how difficult that is. Still, third time lucky I guess."

"Not much luck?"

A flourish of the hand encompassed the street.

"Look at it. Lunchtime in the run up to Christmas."

"Surely, half-empty shopping streets filled with surly brutes is the Helminthdale brand?"

"That would be accurate, right enough. It would be nice to be aspirational."

I wished him luck with his doomed exercise and made my way through the merry throng saying "How much?!" as they window-shopped the Help The Aged outlet.

With the bull I dance the tango

The staff in Helminthdale Lending are going out for their Xmas do tonight. They've booked in for an evening's drinking supplemented by "authentic Northern tapas."

Looking at the menu, these turn out to be: chicken in a basket, cocktail sausages and sausage rolls on sticks.

Please let me love you tonight, Gladys, tomorrow I won't have the time

Nancy's team had their Xmas do last night at The Ponderosa in Pardendale. By all accounts, and delicacy of voices, they had a good time of it. They weren't overly impressed by the cabaret: an elderly chap who did impersonations of Sid James singing a medley of Tom Jones hits.

"Oooh... Did you hear his hip click when he did that pelvic thrust?"

Oh, that's just naughty!

Just prior to a General Election, the Vice-Chairman of Her Majesty's Opposition, in the spirit of philanthropy, has seen fit to donate copies of his remaindered hagiography to the public libraries of the nation.

If it were down to me it would be shelved with the L.Ron Hubbards.

A sessions gorilla on vox humana

A customer, in his dressing gown, wandered into Dutch Bend Library, pushed over a shelf of books, said "good morning" and departed.

The really scary thing is that come an election he's got a vote, same as thee and me.

Out in the scullery...

With Mary just retired and hard rumours about T.Aldous' retirement running round the Town Hall like mice in a windmill; and with corporate uncertainties such as the two simultaneous high-level reorganisations of the same departments, the possibilities of our being hived off into an arms-length organisation and the massive spending cuts; and with no end of jiggery-pokery going on at regional and national levels; now is probably as good a time as any for us to take stock of our service management.

Regular readers (bless you both) will have noticed that I quite often have some harsh things to say about our managers. This is largely because there are times when I want to shake them until their eyeballs drop out and it's probably safer for me to vent my spleen in this blog instead. I haven't, by any means, given you the whole picture. No apologies for that: it's my blog I can do what I want, so there. But I should at this point make it quite clear that in some respects we're quite lucky to have the library service managers we have. For one thing, they're not stupid, nor evil. They're reasonably intelligent, well-meaning people who are hard-working and conscientious. It's not everybody who can say that. Unfortunately, being well-intentioned isn't always enough, the road to Hell and all that. And putting a lot of hard work into things that don't really matter, while neglecting things that do, isn't good business either. Their effectiveness, individually and collectively, is shot to bits the by way we do things here. And that, in turn, isn't helped at all by Helminthdale Council's conducting business rather in the manner of a Daffy Duck cartoon. But we don't help ourselves.

T.Aldous cops for a lot of the blame for things. Indeed, T.Aldous is the Universal Scapegoat. And to be fair, he is to blame for a lot of the way we go about things. If you're dealing with him there are a few things you need to bear in mind:

• Nearly everything that T.Aldous does is intended to make sure that if anything goes wrong it wasn't him as done it. Naturally phenomenally defensive by nature, it is a tragedy that he was manoeuvred into the post by Shagger Noakes, who then spent the next ten years giving T.Aldous every good reason to make sure that his back was armour-plated at all times. By the time the idiot Noakes was paid off by the council the instincts were so ingrained as to be inescapable. So we can't do anything that may make us accountable to anybody for having made a decision (I am quoting T.Aldous himself there). This is no way to run a whelk stall, but then if Shagger Noakes were running a whelk stall the thing would have gone bust well before there was any question of hiring any staff and the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place.
• T.Aldous has a nagging eye for detail. Which is great if you need to win a war of attrition with somebody particularly stubborn like the Human Resources Department, or downright rude like the Treasurer's Section. Unfortunately, it's not so great when you're a month past the deadline for delivering something and he's still obsessing as to whether or not that comma should be there on the invitation cards.
• There is no such thing as experience. Things happen. If we get away with it, we've got away with it and there's nothing to learn by it. If we don't get away with it it's because somebody else didn't do something and there's nothing to learn by it.

Having said that, T.Aldous is all too often a convenient reason for people not getting on with essential pieces of work. Quite a few times people have had conversations with him and discovered that the things they had been told for years are impossible because T.Aldous is stopping them happening are not only possible but, once he's found out they need doing, can be done within days or weeks.

It's convenient to refer to T.Aldous' lieutenants as Policy Team, which they call themselves, but one shouldn't take that as some sort of indication that they manage to work in any sense collectively. Far from it: while you can get quite a lot done by dealing with any one or two of them, the minute you need them to act or decide on things as a team you may as well jack it in and take your satchel home. They spectacularly don't work as a team and it baffles them as much as us to watch it happen.

Doreen and Julia are the Group Township Librarians, each responsible for the libraries in half of the Borough. They are both out of their depth, the difference being that Doreen realises it and has huge crises of confidence whereas Julia doesn't realise it and blithely steams through regardless of the consequences. Their positions aren't hopeless: if, at any time, determining the direction of our library service becomes any easier than pinning blancmange onto a buffalo then they have potential. It has to be said that Doreen is the better bet of the two, though. In many respects Julia is T.Aldous-lite, with many of his weaknesses and none of his political sensitivities. Doreen is remarkable for being the only member of Policy Team to realise that she is a personnel manager and that this involves a bit more than doing the weekly returns and the annual performance review.

Milton's the Reference, Information & Learning Manager and in some respects he's got the short straw. The good news is that Doreen and Julia line manage all the reference librarians, as staff of the establishment of the libraries they run. The bad news is that he doesn't line manage the reference librarians and so can't hold them to account when they don't deliver anything more than wet excuses (and too often not even them). The even worse news is that the poor beggar does line manage me. I've come to realise over the years that I'm a very difficult person to manage; I don't do it on purpose and I don't go out of my way to cause problems, but evidently I'm difficult. Milton, in turn, is a difficult person to be managed by. He's a genuinely nice bloke, very supportive, no end of ideas. Unfortunately, it's a bit like going for a walk with a golden labrador: you know where you'd intended going but you never seem to get there because you're spending half the time wondering where the hell he's run off this time. Every so often I have to hold my hand up and say: "yes, I know we could do all those things, and there's quite a few other things that would spin off from them, but what are we actually going to do?" To his credit, he'll take that off me (and nearly anybody else, too, for that matter) but not everybody would have the confidence to ask.

Jack Harry's very much the new boy. He's our Projects & Development Manager. I'm still trying to work out how he's doing. The good news is that he's happy to take responsibility for getting things done and taking any flak for it afterwards. The bad news is that he seriously underestimates the organisational problems with got, particularly with communication. And he's already got that hunted look about him that we all recognise from our looking in mirrors.

The situation's not hopeless, but we can't carry on the way that we are. Fingers crossed for the new year, I guess.

It could ruin your tinkle

Bronwyn and I have had an argument.

"For God's sake! You're not taking that manual home to read over the weekend."

"It'll be all right. It's a bit of light reading for me."

"No. You shouldn't take work home to do."

"Hark who's talking!"

"And which of us has had the nervous breakdown then?"

Needless to say, she still took the manual home with her. We're both of the same age, which means that any slight advantage in the argument I may have had in our youth has more than evaporated.

A pre-owned chicken korma

Freezing the spending on buying new books has given Bronwyn and Noreen time to start picking up a lot of loose ends. Already they're regretting wondering why:

• The Reference Library keeps copies of "The Draper" for one month then puts lending date labels on them and ships them out to Pottersbury Road Library. Which literally doesn't have enough room for the stock, shelves or furniture it should have. Not since the school we pay the rent to stole a quarter of the floor space to make a new SureStart office. (We still pay the same rent, mind.)
• The Reference Library has a 1969 edition of "A Selection of the Coins of Rome from the Time of Trajan" on the open shelves.
• Fifteen year-old Ordnance Survey maps are being transferred from the Reference Library to Dutch Bend's lending library.
• There are four boxes of classical music cassettes under Mary's old desk, but on the shelves at Umpty Library according to the catalogue.

Sometimes it's as well to leave well alone.

No grind or whistle

"There's something wrong with my 'phone," says T.Aldous.

I'm appalled by the effort of will involved in not saying: "Yes, you've not answered it for twenty years."

The tricks of Screwy Driver

Fate and my subconscious have a habit of ganging up on me every so often.

I'm reading a copy of "Les Inconnus dans la Maison" only because it was at the top of a pile of old Simenon paperbacks that we were debating whether to withdraw from stock.

Field-dressing a moose

"I'll be decking him!" mutters Bronwyn.

So far this week she's done an author visit and two reading groups' Xmas parties; done reader support visits to two Social Care Learning Centres and to a homeless shelter; and unpicked the orders that can't be sent after T.Aldous took the money out of what was left of the book fund.

Arriving back from the shelter at lunchtime she was accosted by T.Aldous who berated her because the display window upstairs hadn't been updated since the beginning of November.

"We should have a Xmas display in there now!" he eventually mithered.

And so we should. Except:

• The display window's got nothing to do with Bronwyn.
• The Library Assistants who were planning on updating the window haven't had the chance because they've spent the past two weeks out of the building, providing cover for people who are no longer there.

We'll miss this if he ever goes.

When they all go back to Tennessee there'll be no one left in Wigan but thee

One of Maybelle's contacts is coming to visit on the morrow and asked for directions. "Can you send me a Google Maps link?" he asks.

Which is how we discovered that according to Google Maps the only places of interest in Helminthdale town centre are a knocking shop and a railway station that Doctor Beeching shut down.

Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted

Early Years' Story Time upstairs in the library is held in part of the library away from the children's library proper, where there's a bit more space for the toddlers to join in the singing and can dance a bit if the mood takes them.

This area's also used by Youth Workers so we've got some 'life skills' books for teenagers and young adults on the shelves just round the corner.

Luckily, the mother laughed when her child toddled up with a copy of "101 Things To Do With A Condom" and asked her to read him a story.