Thursday 5 August 2010

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.

8 comments:

  1. Great stuff. I wonder how things might have turned out for you had the blogverse existed back then? I esitmate that approx 90% of the world's blogging is done at 'work'...

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  2. I wonder too - so many more possibilities... And quieter keyboards!

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  3. A super and poetic description. It accords very well with the atmosphere of the large local library and its "residents" when I lived in London. The library where I live now is much more like Brit's description of Mums with toddlers and pensioners. I guess it all depends on the area. The local library here has a pretty and peaceful garden, clearly a draw for pensioners stuck in flats and perhaps lonely too. I hope the cuts don't hit libraries too hard. If they do, the consequences - vagrancy, depression, etc - will turn up on the streets and in doctors' surgeries and end up costing the same anyway. Perhaps libraries always were social centres; they clearly are now.

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  4. You have brought to life for us Nige, a collection of what had been thought of as dusty cubby holes.
    We hope of course that the experiences didn't mirror those of the Famous Phil, Larkin that is who seems to have extracted uses of the carnal kind whilst cataloguing in Hull. "I see old what's-his-name is cataloguing again, dirty old bugger.

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  5. I don't know quite how you do it, Malty, but you make 'cataloguing' sound like a euphemism for activity of the filthiest kind.

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  6. It always seemed so to me - pregnant with erotic possibilities - until I actually had to do some, that is. It is exceedingly boring...

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  7. Lovely statement. I am finding myself wondering as well.

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