I've been trying for so long to make a name in this business that I've forgotten what it is

We live in interesting times, as the old curse has it. We are thrice-cursed by:

• The routine disarray of Helminthdale Library Service, particularly its management lapses;
• The routine disarray of Helminthdale Council, compounded by the sudden need to fix a humongous gap in the finances (it is entirely untrue to suggest that one of the departmental budgets fell at Kempton Park, though it's a fun anecdote); and
• The government's impending imposition of austerity economics, including the commissioning of Utility siren suits for senior members of the banking fraternity.

A few suggestions have now been put on the table. It would be naive to expect there to be any good news. It would be nice to have any news that wasn't actually baffling. All the current proposals are predicated on savings generated by shared services and partnership working. Which is great so long as you don't go looking at the details. For instance, the impact of the cuts in the careers services are to be obviated by the youth service's taking on more of their role; and the impact of the cuts in the youth service are to be obviated by...

Friday afternoon's staff briefing wasn't especially illuminating. For the most part it's good news for the library service as the song is: "we'll have a think about this later." Which may be a stay of execution or not but at the very least it isn't a bonfire of our particular vanities just yet. Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week) are justifiably antsy because it heralds yet another re-jig of their jobs with no guarantee that any of them will be safe. Those rest of us who provide support services to the library service but don't have the word 'Librarian' in our job description are also looking a bit vulnerable.

I get the distinct impression that my job's there to fight for should I put the effort in for it. The irony doesn't escape me (they seldom do). I don't know if I'm up for yet another fight or not. What with one thing or another I'm feeling pretty burnt out and jaded at the moment.

I've spent a long time telling people that there's still all to play for. I just need to manage to convince myself some time.

A million miles from the Ovaltine

Going through the library I pass by Frog's Summer Stories Session. He's using one of those Nick Sharratt books that are split down the middle so that you can play mix and match with the pictures ("Exquisite Corpse" as the Dadaists would say).

"A bath full of custard!" he said. "Have you ever had a bath full of custard? How do you think it got there? Do you think it came through the taps? Cold custard through that one and hot custard through that one? Perhaps it's all cold custard - ewww! I bet that would clog up the plugs!"

I listened to this and looked at the faces of the children and wondered what the fuck we were doing making him sit in meetings listening to gobshites telling us how clever they are at engaging with the community.

There's posh: he's got trousers

Yet another procession. Yet again the Olympians struggle to say what we are and who we do.

As they wander off to do whatever it is that they do Sybil can be heart to mutter:

"No fecking idea..."

Do you think he's crazy, skipper?No, just enthusiastic

A visitor was enthusing about the furniture in the Reading Room.

"You can feel the philosophy oozing out of those sofas"

Is this the movie picture ship?

Yet another procession of people unknown to us coming through the library, the fourth in three days. It's Doreen's turn to act as hostess with the mostess this time. She points out the salient points of the personnel sitting round the office:

"That's the Acquisitions Team and they do... well, it's really important work they do for us. And that's Sybil, who does the Regional Loans. And that's Frog, he runs our children's library services..."

As usual, the introductions aren't reciprocated so we have no idea who any of them are, or why.

We're going to get some gingham table cloths and a teapot. We've spent the rest of the morning pracising picking fleas off each other.

Underwear for the hard of hearing

Jack Harry has decided that as of this week we are no longer accepting paper stock suggestion forms.

"Have you told the branch libraries that we're not taking paper forms?" asks Noreen.

"I'd assume that they're already sending them in by email," he replies.

"Err no. They're not."

"It's easy enough for them to do."

"I know it's easy enough for them to do but have you told them they've got to do it."

We have concluded that the answer is "no."

How efficiency works

Telephones.

We have refined the current arrangements.

Instead of the bad old days when we spent half our lives answering the 'phone for T.Aldous we spend at least half our lives answering every beggar's 'phone.

• Some people put their 'phones through to Maisie's 'phone. They don't tell her, of course until after she's spent hours fielding their calls.
• The 'phones upstairs are set so that if they aren't answered within four rings they come downstairs to Maisie's 'phone. If that's not available they go to Maudie's 'phone.
• The 'phones down here are set so that if they aren't answered within four rings they get sent into a hunt group.

This last is a barrel of laughs. If you're not paying attention your incoming 'phone call automatically gets switched to somebody else's 'phone. So you try to retrieve your call by trying to pick it up. And pick up the call that rang just the once on somebody else's 'phone.

Say, just as an example of course, that somebody upstairs rings downstairs to tell somebody down here there's a 'phone call from a relative. And that somebody decides to ignore their 'phone because they want to hear more about somebody's holiday. And that it the comes to your 'phone. And you try to put the call through to the person who's been ignoring it. But their 'phone has been put through to the lending office 'phone...

Hilarious consequences.

This morning's capper? Noreen gets a 'phone call. It's somebody ringing somebody in the library, they don't know who as they've just picked up the telephone number from their answerphone. Noreen does a tour of the floor asking if anybody knows him. Nobody in our office has heard of him so we're baffled. An attempt to ring upstairs to see if anyone up there wants this chappie leads to that call coming back down here. In the end, all Noreen can do is take his name and number and apologise for wasting his time.

I look forward to somebody apologising for wasting ours.

Walking through an empty house

The office is like the Mary Celeste without the crowd scenes.

• Maudie and Maisie are attending a meeting about the future of their jobs
• Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week) are wherever they are today. Somebody rather tactlessly wrote "Missing In Action" on the staff notice board and there was a bit of a to-do as to whether or not there was a space between n and A.
• The Acquisitions Team (both of them) are in a meeting with Bronwyn to try and work out what on earth is going on with one of the new collections that somebody higher up is supposed to have sorted out.
• Frog is out doing a summer story session with some blind children in Umpty.

So it looks like I'm in charge. That being the case, I wonder if it would be an abuse of executive power to tell the lending library to stop diverting all their 'phones down here.

Hats and rabbits

I've just had a long chat with Maybelle at the end of which she said:

"I'm puzzled by this meeting. You asked for a chat to go through something you wanted me to help you with but as far as I can see you're the one who's taken on all the work."

I was a bit puzzled too. And a little nervous: had she decided that I had really designs on her body she would have kicked my head in. As it was, we decided to give up and stalk the kettle without getting to the bottom of the puzzle.

Of course, I can leave no scab unpicked so I've been mulling this over. Actually, it turns out to be key to the way that Maybelle and I work together. Milton reckons its a good partnership because we both plan ahead and that while I'm good at seeing how best to do things she's good at getting them done. There's a lot to that but I think there's something else in the mix, too.

The bit of my job that's not explicitly in my job description is talking and listening to people. You need to know what people want to do and why before you can try to apply a systemic solution to it. (A systemic solution may be: "it works as it is, why monkey with it?") Very broadly, we have three groups of people I need to talk to:

• The lacking in confidence. I have to go into sheepdog mode: "I know you don't think you're capable of doing this but look at this, that and that: you're doing it all the time and doing a good job of it. What do you mean, you can't do that? Just look at this that you've done. Honestly, come on you can do it!"
• The lacking in will. I go into sheepdog mode again: "We both know you can do this; and we both know that you want me to do this for you so that you don't have to and you can bitch about it afterwards if anything goes wrong. Now we both know that where are you going to go now?"
• The lacking in restraint. I go into sheepdog mode yet again: "Yes, they're all brilliant ideas and we could do that, that, that, that, that, that and that but we haven't yet worked out how to do this, which is what we got together to decide in the first place."

This is all well and good, and I can do this to a lesser or greater extent. But I am not a natural sheepdog. By all that is natural I am one of those elderly, plodding, golden retrievers that can spend hours staring at Belisha beacons. I've trained myself so that I can do all that mental running around and chasing and chivvying to help other people get started with a piece of work or to help them marshal their thoughts. Unfortunately, I can't do it very well for myself and just lately I've been running myself ragged trying to help other people deal with an explosion of Stuff To Deal With.

It used to work quite well back when I shared an office with Jimmy Huddersfield because he, being resolutely not a theorist and being very practically-minded, was an ideal sounding board for me to get my thoughts in order. I've really missed that since he retired. Thinking it through, I think this is what I'm getting out of chatting with Maybelle. The dynamic's different because they're different thinkers but the function's the same.

It'll probably be safer if I tell her I'm after her body.

Not so much as a tartiflette

Kevin the van driver has thrown a wobbly (there was one hanging round in the dispatch room).

It was presented as a kick-off about taking a pile of summer reading game stuff over to Grimley Community Centre but really it's a reaction to his having spent the whole of Friday taking vanloads of assorted tat and breakages over to the old Roadkill Library (which should have been demolished this time last year BTW) only to come back here to be asked where he'd been all afternoon because there was something needing going over to the new Roadkill Library.

Maudie and Brownyn can usually filter nonsense like that out of his work schedule but every so often one of other brighter sparks goes direct to the delivery.

And some of the children's librarians even remember Ted Ray

OK. The good news is that Helminthdale Central Library is running a regular Monday morning Tiny Tots Tales Time throughout the school holidays so we that keep on supporting pre-school children and their families during the usual frenetics.

The bad news is that the librarians of Helminthdale Central Library have decided that their weekly team meeting is going to be every Monday morning. So once a week, five minutes before the doors open, one or other of them will go up to Frog and say:

"Frog, we're struggling a bit this morning. Can you do Tiny Tots for us, just for this morning?"

It's taken him a month to realise what they're doing and he isn't overly impressed.

The loofah snapped but the rubber duck came out unscathed

"I think I'm a jaguar," says Maybelle.

"Eh?" asks Frog.

"I think it's a jaguar. Or a puma or something."

"A cougar?"

"That's it! I think I'm turning in a cougar!"

"Oh yes?"

Apparently she'd spent all yesterday afternoon overlooking a gym and struggling not to be distracted by hunky young men.

A field of frozen lettuce

The lists, twits and inboxes are full of talk of this, that or another bit of proposed reorganisation, rejigging, reconfiguring, etc. etc. etc. of the public library service at one level or another.

There's talk of wholesale cuts; replacing staff with volunteers and sundry other scaries. Will we stay as we are? Will we be chopped to bits? Will we be hived off to a charitable trust? Will we be scrunched together with the library services of Pardendale or Bencup, or even embroiled in whatever is to go on in Greater Manchester or the North-West Region, or the whole North of England?

And on top of that, of course, no sensible person would put five bob on Helminthdale Council still existing in five years' time (we're due another bout of municipal reorganisations nationally).

Latest news is that the soon-to-be-defunct MLA is funding feasibility studies for very large scale joint-authority efficiency programmes across the country. I mentioned this in passing to Ken Barmy as we chatted on the 'phone about a problem with a bibliographic database we both use.

"There's already a lot of unseemly jostling for position amongst the Chief Librarians," I observed.

"Mensheviks fighting over the window seat in the back rooms of the Duma," he replied.

Don't blow it too much or it'll look like Jimmy Edwards

Posy's a bit wound up by things, convinced that "they" (she's already picked up that habit) know more than they're letting on about cuts, reorganisations, efficiencies and sundry gremlins, hobgoblins and calamities of moment.

I've tried to explain:

"It's much, much worse than that: they seriously don't have an idea from one day to the next. It's all being made up on backs of fag packets one daft decision at a time, each with no reference to the last decision or the next, and managers too often finding out what's going on from their underlings."

The truly awful thing is that we both find this a comforting thought.

A million and one maybes

That's depressing: travelling through a neighbouring borough to a meeting we pass what used to be a nice little community library. It's now a "Prime Regeneration Site."

Helpfully, the road sign still says "Library."

I'll have none of that language, not even through a brown paper parcel

A strange day. For once I've been crosser with the staff than the managers. To explain I must make something clear from the onset:

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

I'll repeat that:

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

The scythes are flashing round parts of Helminthdale Council and have been doing for months but

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

So we have a touch of the dooms. Not helped by what few words filter out from The Bunker: nothing can be done because "they" (it's always "they") will "probably decide to cut" whatever is under discussion. And Doreen has spent the past two months telling anyone who'll listen (and many who won't) that she's not long for this world.

Milton, to his credit, is at least going out and about trying to start new things going and encouraging staff to take any opportunities going for personal or professional development. He drives me barmy because we're supposed to be working as a team and I'm finding out too much of this as an afterthought but at least he's doing something constructive most of the time. Other than that, the word is that we are doomed.

Staff are naturally dismayed and worried. Which is fair enough. I'm not, which is also fair enough. It could be my Quixotic nature, it could be sheer bloody-mindedness or it could be that I think if something's worth fighting for when the things are relatively easy it's worth fighting for when the shit hits the fan. But I entirely accept that people are going to be dismayed and worried, especially when what passes for leadership is as feckless and supine as ours as been lately. T.Aldous, and to a far lesser extent Mary, would at least have been arguing the case for the library service long and loud, however ill-advisedly or ineptly. Even dear old Reggie Clockwatcher, who was a lovely man but a shockingly weak manager, would have been making the effort. But... But... And so staff are dismayed and worried.

I do draw the line when they decide that despite the lack of objective evidence they are actually doomed and there is nothing that anybody will or can say that they will listen to that will contradict this.

No. We're not doing that. We don't have the spare time, space or energy for that.

So I got cross. And pinned their ears back. Which they didn't like. Nor would I have done in their shoes if I'm being honest but I'm not letting them do it. If senior managers decide that they are doomed, that's up to them. If senior managers try to sell staff down the river to buy their own safety, that's despicable and I'll say so and I'll fight it. But I am not having staff undermining themselves and their colleagues and, effectively, selling themselves down the river.

And I said so.

We'll all calm down, because we do in the end, and we'll see what we can do despite the organisational culture, because that's also what we do. And if things do get really bloody we'll do what we can and we'll care and we'll support and we'll hope for the best because that's what we would want to do if it came to that. But if it really does come to that I don't want people compounding their injuries by already having undervalued themselves and their contribution to the service.

A serious bit

I was sorry to hear of the death of Bob McKee, the Chief Executive of CILIP, over the weekend. I never met him but we'd exchanged emails a few times and during his time in charge he'd managed to turn CILIP away from its prissy navel-gazing and into an organisation I've recently been seriously tempted to join (you'd have put good money on my never writing that sentence!)

A serious loss to the national public library service at a time when too many of the people we rely on locally for advocacy have decided that we're all already doomed and we should be turning customers away from the doors in case we get too busy.

The turnip: it's place in nudism

I bump into Ken Barmy. To say that he is disconsolate is to understate immensely. He has just emerged, blinking, from a meeting with his management board.

"How goes it old fruit," say I.

"It's all rotifers and Volvox," he replied, which bode ill.

"As bad as that?"

"We were discussing staffing our libraries..."

"Yes..." this is currently The Discussion That Anybody In The Public Sector Would Prefer To Sidle Away From.

"One of our senior managers reckoned that we have too many staff in our libraries."

I know for a fact they're even worse placed than us for being able to open the doors each morning.

"How do they reckon that?"

"She reckons that they only need so many staff because the libraries get busy with customers."

"Oh Hell. She's not decided that you can dispense with staff and do it all online has she?"

"Oh no. She's dead against online because we must get our visitor figures up."

My brain was already starting to hurt. I asked a question I shouldn't.

"So what does she mean then."

"She reckons that we need to manage customer throughput. She suggested that we give customers red bracelets, like they do in busy nightclubs, and ask them to come back later."

"Kenneth, please tell me you are taking the piss."

He wasn't.

"You poor dear fellow."

It was all I could do not to put a white fiver in his hand and tell him to buy himself a cup of tea.

We look after your circle of water

Not another bloody project without aims, resources, priorities, success factors or exit strategy.

Can you hear me, mother?

News of Bronwyn's Digby Moment has spread around the more irreverent pastures of the library service.

"I don't see why you couldn't get Rudyard Kipling, or W.E. Johns," says Frog.

"Or Enid Blyton," suggests Sybil.

"We could have a dead authors' evening at Dutch Bend Library!"

"I'm getting a message from the other side... Does the name Biggles mean anything to anybody? Ginger? Algy?"

"Mrs. Johnstone... I'm getting a message from Robert Louis Stevenson... He says that your cat Tiddles is happy on the other side..."

"You can laugh!" muttered Bronwyn. "You watch: he'll try to stop you putting on the puppet show in Spadespit because it's not David Blaine."

"That's alright. We can put a big box in the library and tell them that that's him."

"Now then, Mrs. Johnstone, it's up to you now. Are you going to take the money or will you open the box?"