What a pleasant afternoon I’ve just spent loitering in the library. Not, thank you very much, a Learning Resource Centre.
I mean, why would you want to hunch over a communal computer, with the machine counting down the minutes of your apportioned time, till it automatically pulls the switch on you? Spare me the digital discourtesy. I wanted to be with books, big, yellowing, musty, dusty things that pleasingly thud when you lay a pile on the freshly polished oak table. Books with pictures of the author glowering or smirking uncomfortably in the back flap. Books with big black sans-serif print, slightly smudgy around the edges.
Only books will do some days. Let’s face it, I am more vintage than virtual.
Books make some people nervous. And I know lots of people who are set against libraries, something to do they say with all that enforced quiet. I don’t understand. Books are possibly the least offensive object in existence. And what harm has anyone come to being told to hush? I can think of many worse things than getting asked to be quiet. Nothing bad really ever happened to anyone in a library.
Remember when you were little, people never came up to you in a library and said how much you looked like your dad or enquired about that tearaway sister of yours or spat on a hanky and swabbed your face or told you to tidy away your toys and go to bed early and have you done your homework and written that thank you card to granny for that birthday balaclava.
When you went to the library as a teen nobody ever waited outside to beat you up or told you to stop acting so sulky and stand up straight and isn’t it time you stopped mooching around the place and started acting like a grownup and would you just stop treating this place like a hotel.
It’s even better at university because nobody drops by the library to tell you how much of your student loan has been spent on beer and bad gigs and that you never ring home and your hair looks like a rats nest and your mum is worried sick you’re not looking after yourself properly and nobody knows why you’ve turned out this way you were always such a diligent student and you are remembering to take precautions, aren’t you!
Nobody ever gets dumped in a library. Nobody ever has “the conversation” and says it’s not you it’s me and you really are the most superficial, self-absorbed, sarcastic shit they have ever had the displeasure to meet and they never liked your taste in music either.
And now, when I’m all grown up and in terminal decline the library is an even more wonderful place to be, more familiar and full and resonant.
For a few hours you are safe from gas bills and final notices and council tax and demands from ex-partners and those fearful phone calls that make electric jelly in your gut.
And the boiler never breaks down in the library and the vacuum cleaner never chokes to a shuddering, squealing death and no one ever mentions how much you don’t measure up to the manifold responsibilities of manhood, how lazy you are and how easy it would be for you to just make everything better if only you would try, for once show some gumption, gall, get up and go, but you never will because you lack moral fibre, character, persistence, and why will you never learn to drive and you still haven’t tidied up your toys.
I almost didn’t want to leave. If the library sold beer, I’d move in.