Offensive Weapon

In which The Author has one over the eight

(Written Monday, 29 May 2017)

Facebook very kindly reminded me this morning that it's been exactly eight years since I worked my last ever shift in Waterstone's. (It still had an apostrophe when I started there, so I've kept it for nostalgia's sake.) Before I left the house on that Saturday morning in late spring 2009, I posted a status saying that it was 'the end of an error'.

Funnily enough, I seem to have lost (or gained) about ten days in the intervening years. I was convinced that I'd finished some time in the middle of May, but the Internet never forgets. Maybe I was on Cwm Gwaun Time. (You'll have to look that up, I'm afraid. You have access to the Internet. Go on …)

It certainly was the end of an era. When I was working in the book trade, at least there was a reasonable probability of having an interesting conversation once a month or so.

It's bank holiday weekend.

I made the mistake of waking up on Saturday morning. To be more precise (and armed with two electronic clocks which observe British Summer Time when it's officially summer, and here in Wales when it isn't most of the time, and UTC when it isn't), I woke up in the early hours of Saturday morning. On Friday, there hadn't been a cloud in the sky all day. To mark the occasion, I got my arms out. Owing to various Unexplained Drunken Injuries and the ever-increasing homophobia in Aberdare, my long shapely legs stayed under cover.

At some point on Saturday morning (it was still dark outside), I decided not to look out of the bedroom window because I'd heard a couple of fantastic thunderclaps. Because I've been bingeing the Harry Potter films again, I was scared in case the Dark Mark had appeared over Aberdare Park. I've also reached the M page of the British National Formulary, so anything can happen in the next thirty days or so. The whole storm could just have been a psychedelic episode.

Then the rain started.

Yeah, I know. Torrential rain on a bank holiday weekend in South Wales. Who saw that coming, eh?

Two bands featuring good friends of mine (with some interesting overlaps) were scheduled to play at Aberdare Park in the afternoon. I ruled that out immediately. If I'm going to get drenched at a music festival, I'm going to (at least) pack my tent and spend half a day trekking across country to get there. I'm not going to stop off for chips on the way there and eat them when they're still warm.

Anyway, I needed to go into town to book a day trip to Carmarthen and/or Saundersfoot. I haven't been to Carmarthen for at least twenty-five years. It's much longer since I was in Saundersfoot. If the weather was clement, a breath of sea air would fill a gap between London trips. If not, I could have explored Carmarthen with my camera for a few hours before hitting the pub. I didn't see the advert for the trip until late on Thursday afternoon. Last time I tried booking a day trip, it was pulled at the last minute because of the poor response.

Talking of poor responses: on Thursday evening Steff and I went to an excellent production of The Trials of Oscar Wilde at the Coliseum, together with about forty or so other people who'd decided that a one-off 3D cinema experience (in other words, an actual play, with actual actors, in real time) was a better option than the three millionth episode of EastEnders.

On our way out, one of the ushers handed us a leaflet for forthcoming shows, and commented that they'd had a pretty good turnout for the evening. Apparently, the place is under new management. Well, if I'd recently been appointed to oversee a 620-seat theatre and had sold just fifty tickets for a touring theatre production, I doubt if I'd make it through my probationary period in post.

But I digress …

Back to Saturday. I had some breakfast in Servini's, found out that the Saundersfoot trip had been cancelled owing to lack of interest, and wandered up to the Lighthouse for a pint. I left about two pints later. I couldn't be bothered to stay out among the six times a year (bank holidays, Xmas/New Year, and Black Friday) drinkers, so I made my excuses and left. I did a bit of shopping, made something to eat, and watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets again. And so to bed, as the man wrote …

And that was Saturday.

On Sunday, I didn't even bother. I had plenty of graphics prepared for the cycling event I'm planning for next year, so I spent the afternoon half-listening to Radio 4 while preparing a presentation with the other half of my brain. They're doing a two-part broadcast of Pygmalion, which I read years ago but have never seen on stage. I told Hannah and Eirlys ages ago that if the Colstars ever do My Fair Lady, I want to try out for Henry Higgins. We have a great deal in common, after all.

I went to the shop for a pint of milk and a bar of chocolate, watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban again, and went to bed in time for some very strange dreams. You can tell I'm a week into my medication, because a) I'm actually sleeping, if only in short bursts, and b) I wake up wondering what the actual fuck has been going on since I put my book down and switched the light off. Maybe Josie should have roped me into her PhD study group when I was starting on a new prescription.

This morning I decided to head to Thereisnospoon for breakfast, if only to see some friendly faces behind the bar. I was making very good progress with the Cycling Project when my pal Simeon came in and asked if he could join me. Simeon and I are very similar, in that we respect each other's personal space and don't force ourselves to make conversation when we're not in the mood. We chatted for a couple of minutes; he got his notebook out and started sketching, while I carried out building my presentation. We made our excuses and left at about 3.30. Simeon was going home for lunch. I was heading to the Lighthouse for Performance and Cock-ups.

And I needn't have bothered.

A few weeks I primed Gareth the DJ that we're approaching the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, so I asked him if he could source most (if not all) of the backing tracks in time for this weekend. I'd planned to sing the entire LP set in the right order, with Clare helping out from time to time, interspersed with the other regulars and whoever else fancied having a knock.

In the event, nobody else fancied having a knock.

It wasn't a complete write-off, though. Having sung the title song (a bit high for me), With a Little Help from my Friends (which needs work), A Day in the Life (with way more reverb than the original) and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds alone and without a leader, I confidently predict that Clare and I will absolutely smash the entire set in time for the sixtieth anniversary.

But the youngsters were coming in. They aren't into karaoke. They come in to play pool – but I think they really want to be playing golf, to judge from the number of times the white ball shot across the room. Fed up of being in the firing line, I made my excuses and left.

About ten minutes into my pint in the Prince, I realised that I should have caught the late-running bus to Trecynon instead. A couple in their late fifties started dancing to some fucking techno shite on the jukebox, while everyone else (all three of them – one at the bar, one a few feet from the bar, and the last one by the window, some twenty feet away) started 'arguing' loudly precisely because they all agreed with the Daily Star view on 'fucking immigrants'. The only real debate was over which of them could be the most xenophobic.

(None of them came close to Nigel, the Pissed Dalek, on Saturday, though. After telling everyone who cared to listen – and the rest of the pub, needless to say – that, if he was 'in charge', he'd 'deport the lot of them', he canvassed everyone's opinion as to where he could buy the best kebab. Maybe 'Istanbul' would have been the correct answer. You can't have your baklava and eat it, after all.)

So I returned to the Lighthouse, simply to check my emails and update my Twitter feed. In fact, Twitter asks you 'What's happening?' when you go to update your status. I'd flattened my battery by replying, 'It's Aberdare on a bank holiday Monday. Fuck all's happening #stupidquestion', so I needed to add an extra pinch of vitriol to the potion that's been fermenting slowly for the last eight years.

And one of the golfers shouted over, 'Where have you been, Steve?'

Talk about a soft target.

'I've just come back from a fortnight in Bournemouth,' I called back. 'Express trains, rapid hotel service – it's amazing what you can fit into an hour these days.'

I'll never come up to Oscar Wilde's standards, but I like to think that I can reply to a stupid question with an equally stupid answer. Needless to say, my rapid response was lost on the barbint, but it was also lost on the Pool Golfer. Even after I repeated it for the third time, the penny still failed to drop.

I wasn't surprised in the least. I doubt if he's read a book in his adult life. There's no room for irony or cynicism in modern pop music, which I guess is his primary contact with his native language. In fact, I doubt if he engages with language to any great extent. His main concern is where he can score 'a ten bag' on a Tuesday night in Aberdare. You can do that with rudimentary sign language. I strongly suspect that his main motive for learning my name is that he thinks that a long-haired guy in his early forties (I'm older than I look, remember) with an interesting taste in music might be a new channel for his commerce in illegal drugs.

Failing that, he's hoping that I'll step aside and let him have a shot at Clare. Go for it – we're just good friends, remember …

After maybe the fifth attempt at the punchline, he came over and said, 'Sorry if I've offended you.'

No, you haven't offended me by not finding my off the cuff reply unfunny. Nor have you Labour-voting fuckwits who've spent all day mouthing off about 'the fucking ragheads' and all that jazz offended me. You've offended many of my friends, but I'll leave my friends to sort that out. Nor have you, the homophobic, steroid-guzzling, gym-going, closet queens, offended me simply by having a go at the way I choose to dress. You're the fashion victims who look as though you've just been thrown into G.A.Y. by the door staff, after all.

You have, however, offended me in a whole host of ways: by throwing away ten years' worth of compulsory education in favour of computer games and vacuous, meaningless pop music; by deciding that the only people you want to know are those whom you think you can add to your drug-dealing network; by never travelling further than your Stagecoach Megarider will take you in case you might meet someone interesting from a different background who will turn your fucking head around …

Actually, I'm going to stop here.

Since I won't be in Carmarthen and/or Saundersfoot tomorow, I might as well do what I should have done all weekend and stay in fucking bed. At least by doing that, the chances that I will summarily execute a random Aberdare fuckwit are reduced to very nearly zero.

Nearly …

Tactical Withdrawal

In which The Author kills off some comedy characters

My Facebook friends already know about the long-running Aberdare-based fly-on-the-wall docucomedy The Library, with its regular cast of characters and voice-over comments from yours truly. I'm sad to announce that after five years of uninterrupted fun, the show is coming to an end. Here's a letter which I'm going to send to the head of Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC Libraries Service as soon as they reopen for business tomorrow morning.

Being of a certain age, I remember when reference libraries were invaluable community resources, as well as being places of pleasant retreat and almost sepulchral tranquillity.

In those halcyon days, the stacks would be crammed full of books on every conceivable subject. Racks of magazines would keep us up to date with the latest developments in our chosen field. Newspapers of all political hues offered their take on home and world events. Comprehensive selections of street maps and guides covering the whole of the UK, and road atlases for this country, Europe and the USA, were available to anyone. Anyone wishing to consult the Dictionary of National Biography or the Encyclopædia Britannica would find every volume on open display.

Experienced and knowledgeable local staff would put the most random queries to bed, often without ever picking up a book. They were libraries in the true sense of the word – repositories of information and scholarship, and facilities for learning. All the while, any sound louder than a fieldmouse breaking wind half a mile away was greeted with a glare of thunderous disapproval from the enquiry desk.

You try telling the young people that, and they won’t believe you.

Over the past ten years, the ‘reference’ section at Aberdare Library has been transformed into a hubbub of conversation and electronic babble. At the same time, its primary role – that of information provider – is being whittled down to a handful of public access computers. These are booked solid most days – although they must on operate a shift system, as we are lucky to see them all working at the same time. The book stock, once the first port of call for anyone working on a school or college project, is thin, outdated, or virtually irrelevant to the needs of modern students.

A few months ago, while copy-editing a novel, I took a number of history books off the shelf. I had failed to find anything on the Crusades or the Hundred Years War in the lending library, so I had to make do with what was on offer upstairs. I suspect, given the excellent condition of some of them, that I was the first person to open them since they arrived some in stock fifty years ago. I recently felt sorry for anyone writing an essay on the EU referendum, who would have learned – from a textbook on the shelves – that there are fifteen member states of the European Community, all of which operate their own national currencies.

Long gone are the DNB and the Britannica, superseded by the all-powerful and flawless (apparently) Wikipedia. I still regret that I missed those books in what I refer to as the Not Closing Down Sale. I would have happily snapped them up at a quid each. (Not a quid per volume, you understand – a quid for the whole book.) The online subscription to the DNB has since been discontinued, naturally.

The space formerly occupied by these multi-volume reference works, and others, was converted into a ‘meeting room’. I dare say this seemed like a good idea at the time. Victoria Hall had closed, and community groups needed a space where they could get together. Where better than the library …?

New reference purchases appear to consist solely of the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue, the Sky Sports Football Yearbook, Patrick Moore’s Astronomy Yearbook, the Statesman’s Yearbook, Who’s Who, and Whitaker’s Almanac. I suspect that most of these only slip through because nobody has yet thought to cancel the standing orders. It’s fair to say that I have never consulted the first two, and very rarely look at the third. I do find the last three of occasional use, although having bought outdated editions of each last year, I rarely refer to them on site.

(As an aside: On the most recent occasion when I wanted to look at Whitaker’s Almanac, I had to ask the librarian for it. It is kept behind the counter, along with the very few street maps which are now held in stock. It would have been quicker to jump on a train to Cardiff and buy my own copy than to wait for the librarian to mentally process this simple request.)

The solitary English dictionary published this millennium is on the shelf because, when I upgraded to a later edition a few years ago, I offered it to the library. I needed a reliable up-to-date dictionary on hand when I was working, and it seemed as good a home for it as any. Have we really returned to the 19th century, where libraries were run by charitable bodies and relied on donations from the public? Margaret Thatcher would have been proud of our Victorian values.

Similarly, all magazine purchases have ceased, although it seems that a few subscriptions to obscure left-wing periodicals have yet to expire. However, the online portal which formerly allowed access to academic journals free of charge seems also to have been discontinued.

Those of us wishing to keep up with world events have a vast choice between the Western Mail, the South Wales Echo, and the Daily Express. For my part, I would not touch that poisonous racist rag unless I was wearing full biohazard gear. As for the ‘local’ papers: like many people I know, including one former local newspaper editor, I simply cannot see the point of both titles. When the Echo truly was an evening paper, it might have been worth picking up a copy later in the afternoon. When one can buy both the morning and ‘evening’ papers in Cardiff at 7.30 a.m., and in Aberdare half an hour later, is there any valid reason for stocking both?

My primary grievance, however, is that the fundamental nature of the ‘reference library’ has changed beyond recognition.

Libraries have, of course, always been havens for lonely old men seeking a bit of warmth and comfort – and maybe even a couple of hours’ shut-eye – in the guise of ‘reading the papers’.

However, the daily meetings of Aberdare’s unofficial Debating Society have lately begun to dominate proceedings, to the increasing annoyance of serious students and researchers like myself and others. Our Debating Society is never going to outshine OUDS, though. It’s a loose group of a dozen or so older men who treat the library as a social centre. They used to gather every morning around a table in the magazine section, from where they could pontificate on the Great Matters of the Day in repetitive droning monologues. At first, my regular Facebook updates about Horse Racing Bore, Motorcycle Bore, Robot Man, the Ancient Mariner et al amused my friends and acted as a safety valve. It was only by satirising them that I managed to contain my anger.

But the joke soon wore thin. Once these people realised that they could take an inch – that they would be allowed to chunter on for hours, at full volume, without any member of staff asking them to keep their voices down – they proceeded to take a mile. They staked out their little table every day and bored the rest of us rigid with ill-informed rants about the benefits system, bus timetables, ‘current affairs’, immigration, and all those fascinating topics which are usually the preserve of afternoon drinkers.

Young people saw this as an open invitation to play loud music on the public PCs and use their mobile phones, or else chat loudly about failed relationships, criminal records, drug deals and so forth, using the sort of language which also belongs in the saloon bars.

As an experiment I recently took to bringing headphones to the library. Even with the music on my laptop turned up to levels which would make an audiologist blanch, the background noise still won out.

The library, it seemed, was becoming simply a cheap alternative to the Prince of Wales. The town’s elderly bores could gather every day and loudly put the world to rights without having to stand a round of drinks. At the same time, youngsters used it as a glorified cybercafe, but without having to fork out for coffee every half an hour.

Consequently, those of us who wished to work in (relative) peace retreated into the stacks, away from the daylight and the fresh air, and where there are precious few 240V outlets for laptops.

And then we didn’t even have the stacks to ourselves. Once the new school had opened and the Lower Girls School was sold off, the adult education classes found themselves homeless. Current provision for non-vocational adult education is limited to a couple of language classes, a local history class and a creative writing group. Naturally, the perfect home for these would be the ‘meeting room’ – or so everyone thought.

The problem is that it’s too small for more than about eight people at a time to work comfortably, so they had to invade the stacks instead. There are just two tables: one long table around which a dozen or so people can sit without encroaching on each other’s space; and a smaller table around which three people can work comfortably – maybe four at a squeeze, assuming two of them aren’t using laptops.

It is around this first table that the Spanish, creative writing and local history groups gather for two hours a week apiece. In reality, they start to drift in about half an hour beforehand, to chat about life in the week since they’ve last met. Then they drift away at the end of each session, happily picking up where they left off. This means that for approximately eight hours a week the smaller table is effectively out of commission; there is no way to get any work done when the classes are in full flow.

The final straw was laid last week, when the increasingly misnamed ‘reference’ section was revamped yet again. This was as a direct result of a fall sustained by an elderly gentleman – one of the more pleasant regulars, who fortunately also remembers the reason why libraries were built in the first place. In order to reduce the risk of any future accidents, it was decided that the low partition between the Debating Society’s HQ and the main part of the floor should be removed. It never served any useful purpose anyway, except to house the bound history journals, but it acted as a psychological barrier between them and the rest of us.

(It is to be hoped that some elderly playgoer doesn’t suffer a fall inside the Coliseum one evening. Would RCTCBC employ similar panic measures and rip out a dozen rows of seats? Or would they bite the bullet and close the place entirely?)

Then some bright spark decided to remove the table from the former magazine section.

‘It looks more modern like this,’ I was told when I commented on the change last week.

Yes, it does.

In fact, it now looks like the lounge of a day centre for the elderly – which, I fear, is what the ‘reference’ library is rapidly becoming. At the current rate of change, I half-expect to walk in there after the Whitsun bank holiday and find two dozen pensioners gathered around a widescreen TV with the volume turned up to 11, watching Bargain Hunt and sipping cups of lukewarm tea.

Robbed of a table around which they can gather, the Debating Society have now made their way into the stacks. Here they can spread out their papers and drone on relentlessly about their limited areas of interest, while the few of us attempting to use the library for its intended purpose give up any attempt at study and head for the exits.

On Friday afternoon, in fact, I had to ask two elderly gentlemen if they wouldn’t mind wrapping up. A mature student and I were trying to work at the next table, while they discoursed loud and long about supermarket prices, glasses and rugby teams. After an hour, I decided it was time to intervene. I kept my tone reasonable but firm; anyone would have sworn I’d asked them each to give me one of their kidneys. Next time, I won’t be so polite. I know a fair number of young people, and they’ve taught me a word or two which might come in handy.

I freely admit that I no longer talk in a whisper when I’m in the library. After all, it seems hardly worth trying to conceal a fart in the teeth of a stiff gale. But if one of my friends calls in, we at least have the common courtesy to leave and continue our conversation over a cup of coffee or a pint. I seriously doubt, however, that I shall hitherto be visiting the library as often (at least three days out of five most weeks) following this latest development.

When the magazines dried up, there was a public consultation in which many library users (myself included) took part. There was a more recent public consultation about which daily ‘news’paper should be propped up with public money. I submitted my views to that one as well.

I must have missed the public consultation which asked whether library users would be happy to see the entire first floor turned into an overspill area for St Mair’s Day Centre.

In future I shall probably spend more time at the University of South Wales, where they still remember old-fashioned concepts like Books, Reference Materials and Silent Study Areas.

It is to be hoped that when the new library at Pontypridd opens at least one of these quaint traditions can be revived. Having said that, if trends continue, RCTCBC Libraries will consist of a couple of dozen obsolescent PCs, the complete works of James Patterson, and three corpses sitting around the previous day’s Daily Express while the staff wonder why they’ve gone so quiet.