The Library Game

What Are Libraries For? asks Brit in Another Place. One of the things they are (or, more likely, were) for is offering employment and a safe haven to otherwise unemployable freaks, casualties and oddballs like the young Nige. I spent 15 often happy years as a reference librarian in the public libraries of a London borough (interjection by Fast Show character: 'Libraries? I was in the library game meself, 15 years, man an' boy. 'Ardest game in the world, the library game...'). In fact it was remarkably easy work, especially when I found a niche in a reference department so well hidden away that many library users never suspected its existence. I was little troubled by the public - though enough to form a settled resolution never to work too closely with them again - but there was often entertainment of a kind to be had from the drifting population of vagrants, loonies and eccentrics who came and went, some spending their library time sleeping and staying warm, others working their way through the past century's Port of London tide tables or old volumes of Egyptian hieroglyphics, taking copious notes in tiny congested handwriting, or reading every single word of one newspaper (surprisingly common, that, and it takes a quite remarkably long time). Occasionally one of them would trouble me with a request for information - I remember one insisting on finding detailed instructions on how to make an atomic bomb - but most of the time I was free to get on with my other occupations, chiefly writing. Quite often I would be entirely alone, in silence disturbed only by the clatter of the typewriter as I bashed out whatever I was bashing out at the time (it would have nothing to do with librarianship, that's for sure). By the time My Life as a Librarian drew to a close, my Other Activities had quite overtaken my ostensible occupation, and, what with becoming a family man and mortgage-payer, I had more or less joined the human race. I was ready to move on. The library game had served me well.