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 The book stock, once the first port of call for anyone working on a school or college project, is thin, outdated, or virtually irrelevant to the needs of modern students.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.

No Timewasters

In which The Author does exactly what it says on the tin

Those of us who remember the old days of newspaper classified advertisements will be familiar with this little phrase. (Like the news stories these printed artefacts contained, they seem to have fallen into disuse at around the turn of the century.)

The words 'no timewasters' were usually appended to a 'For Sale' ad – for a car, say, or a musical instrument. The idea was to make sure that only people who were genuinely interested (and, more important, who had the money) turned up to check out the item in question. Otherwise, the seller's house could quite conceivably have looked like the scene in The Commitments, when half of Dublin turns up to audition for the band.

Anyway, the next stage of Project No More Nice Guy does just what it says on the tin: No Timewasters.

It seems that my pal Clint has made the same decision independently of me, to judge from his recent decision to stop offering his photography services gratis to 'worthy causes' – who, we all know, have a contingency fund for things like that anyway.

Like me, Clint is (was?) an easygoing guy who gets ripped off because he's too polite to say 'no' when anyone asks for his help. He's a student, so he needs every penny he can get. Every time someone takes him away from his university work, he has to devote time and energy to a project which counts for nothing professionally, and which might – if he's very lucky – earn him a cup of coffee. Last week, he announced on Facebook that he's no longer willing to lug his gear off to some far-flung place (he doesn't drive) in return for fresh air and goodwill.

Relatable post, as the young people say these days. My proofreading and editing skills are also no longer available out of the goodness of my heart. Just because I once met you in the pub twenty-odd years ago, and you now think you're capable of writing a book, don't think I live on Scotch mist and kind thoughts. If you can't at least match the below-NUJ hourly rates paid by Orion Books, then by all means have a search online and find someone cheaper. If you can.

The same goes for my social media skills. I don't claim to have the expertise of my friends Richard J., Chris D., Andrew C. or Siân S., but I can find my way around Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter and Instagram fairly easily. (I've still no idea what Whatsapp or Snapchat are, and since I'm fifty years old I'll probably never bother to find out.) But I know how to use the main channels, and I can use ifttt with only a few hiccups, so I was a lot cheaper than using a web hosting company and trying to tweak all the settings later on.

In fact, just about a year ago I set up a Twitter feed and a Wordpress site for Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon, our constituency branch of the Welsh political party. I knew that Richard was a member of the Labour Party, and would more than likely be offering his hosting and design services to them when the council elections were on the horizon. A few months later, Andrew (who runs a full-scale multimedia production company) announced that he and a friend were setting up the Cynon Valley Party in order to contest council seats this spring.

Although we'd had the online drop on them both, trying to get any information about the key players in our group was almost as difficult as getting a tax refund. In fairness, Cerith Griffith's 2016 Welsh Assembly election campaign was fairly switched on electronically. He used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram while we were out and about leafletting, and we both contributed to the Facebook page. The rest of them, though, seemed perfectly happy to use the same tired toolkit that Dad and the late Dafydd Roberts had used when they were standing for election in the early 1970s.

At the March 2016 branch meeting I raised (for, I think, the third time) the subject of magic sufficiently advanced technology as a valuable campaigning tool for the next round of elections. After all, how many young people do you know who read (never mind buy) a newspaper these days? Most of them don't even watch the TV news any more. If they're anything like the ones I know, they get virtually all their information about the world through their laptops, tablets or smartphones.

It was a section of the electorate that we urgently needed to reach out to. The media (even the electronic media) are dominated by a small clique of neo-liberal or neo-fascist entrepreneurs. Plaid Cymru's message is being swamped by a rising tide of racist, anti-European, anti-Corbyn, anti-worker, anti-NHS rhetoric. The only way to reach out to younger voters, I told them, is via the Internet.

Well, I tried to put the message out there, but it fell mainly on deaf ears.

Undeterred, I set up a hosted (i.e. free) Wordpress blog. I made Twitter and Instagram accounts for us as well. Cerith made me an admin on the Facebook page, so that I could link everything together via ifttt. Once I was sure everything was running properly, I emailed the login details for the Twitter and Instagram accounts to the people whose email addresses I already had. I thought if we all had access, we could use them as and when the mood took us. I encouraged them to post photos or information about local issues whenever they found something to talk about.

When I told them that all this wonderful magic wouldn't cost a penny (that's the single most powerful spell I know, taught only to Hogwarts sixth-formers), and that I'd do it in my own time, they were sold.

Or so I thought.

I decided to keep the Wordpress login to myself. Any decent first-year wizard can retweet stuff, or make a Tweet up themselves. Anyone with a reasonable smartphone can use Instagram. But using Wordpress calls for a knowledge of HTML, widgets, CSS, and other Dark Arts which would have left the others standing.

I started retweeting stuff (even my own stuff) immediately. A few of the others would retweet things I'd published, but hardly ever came up with anything of their own. I think I'm the only person ever to have used the Instagram channel. But the Wordpress site was almost dormant from the start. It wasn't as though it called for any technical involvement from any of the Muggles. I was going to look after the whole thing. Famous last words in the Land Where the Apathetic Rule.

I wanted to set up a page giving a bit of background about the key players in the local group: the chairman, treasurer, secretary, our councillors, and so forth. All I needed was about 250 words about themselves and a decent photo. Dai W., the branch secretary, is a fluent Welsh speaker; Gwyn M., my old pal from Trecynon, is also fluent. Translation wasn't a problem. Neither were photos – in theory. Nearly everyone's got a digital camera these days, or at least a smartphone.

The exception, needless to say, was Brian A., the branch chairman (or Chief Muggle). I knew we'd have an uphill struggle putting his piece together. In the event, Pauline J. ghosted a little biography and took a photo when they were out campaigning together. Gwyn translated it, and I added it to the drafts page.

And that was as far as it got.

Pauline eventually sent me something which I thought needed fleshing out, given her considerable experience in local and national politics, and a stock photo.

Peter F., the branch treasurer, sent me a rather underexposed and blurry photo of himself in his office at home. It was OK, but not great. No text, though. Two and half down, several to go.

Meanwhile, Dai and Karen M. (our councillor in Hirwaun) failed to come up with anything at all. I reminded them frequently that they were writing about the subject they know more about than anyone else alive – themselves – and it shouldn't be too difficult to put 250 words together.

I was wrong, apparently.

Anyway, the council elections are on 4 May. We started selecting candidates back before Xmas. As soon as people came forward, I started pointing out at every single meeting (and about once a week by email) that Richard and Andrew were throwing loads of material out via social media, at least once a day, and occasionally more often than that. We'd gone from being Achilles to being the tortoise in a very short space of time.

Nicola B. (whose father Terry had been a councillor back in the day, and whose brother Geraint ran for Westminster in 2005) sent me a rather elongated photo, which I was loth to use on the page. She also sent me a biog which I thought needed a bit of explanation at one point. I sent back my comments, and I'm still waiting for the revised version.

Between Xmas and New Year, I worked on a draft 'Meet the Candidates' page for a whole afternoon, to give everyone an idea of what the finished design would look like. I sent a couple of page previews out and asked for their feedback, so I could tweak it before it finally went live. The response was exactly what you'd expect. Only Danny A. from Mountain Ash West – a bit of a techie himself – told me he liked the general layout. Nobody else even deigned to reply.

I was keeping the Wordpress site ticking over with a motley assortment of community announcements (blood donation clinics, that sort of thing). They were already bilingual, so I didn't have to fuck about getting them translated, which usually took a couple of days.

In the meantime, I was posting stuff on Twitter and Instagram (see Mind the Gap in my public transport blog) as well; I was mostly retweeting news items and press releases from Tŷ Gwynfor, which nobody else seemed able to do – although Nicola claimed to have used the account a couple of times as well.

Danny sent me a very good biog and a decent picture, which I was able to use without too much intervention. Julie W. from Aberaman South was similarly co-operative, and I had their information ready to go live within a few days of its arriving in my inbox. It never did get published, though, as I had too many outstanding queries from the others to make the page public.

Just after Xmas, totally out of the blue, Danny sent me a scan of a two-page newsletter focusing on the plight of Mountain Ash town centre, and asked me if I could publish it on the blog. It featured bilingual text, a black and white photo of Danny, Nicola and Pauline on Mountain Ash Bridge, and contact details for the three candidates. In spite of my frequent suggestions, it didn't mention our Facebook page, our social media feeds, or the blog.

I published the scans as he'd suggested, but at the next branch meeting I'm afraid to say I lost my temper with everyone. I pointed out that by the time the information got to me, the newsletter was through most of the doors in Mountain Ash, and probably went from there straight into the recycling bag.

I reminded everyone that George Michael had died late on Xmas Day – after the Boxing Day papers had gone to press – and so people who rely on seventeenth-century technology for their information wouldn't have known about it until they read the headlines on 27 December. By way of contrast, within ten minutes of breaking on the BBC website, the news of Mr Michael's death was all over social media.

'We're not in the area of reactive news management any more,' I told them. 'It's all about being proactive these days. If I'd had that information at the outset, it would have been on the blog and all over social media even while Danny was still sorting out the DTP document.'

Dai objected, saying that older people don't use social media (which is true, for the most part), but I told him I wasn't suggesting replacing one means of communication with the other.

I added that we needed to use both channels to complement each other. We had to reach the biggest number of people possible, to convince them that Plaid Cymru is a viable alternative to another five years of Labour domination in the Valleys. Older people are going to be the most difficult to shift from their established voting habits anyway (see No Future); they'll turn out and return the same tired faces to Clydach Vale as they have ever since Clement Attlee was prime minister. On the other hand, younger voters aren't going to look at something printed, no matter how exciting it might be. We needed a two-pronged approach.

That was my argument, anyway.

As it turned out, it was also the argument of one of the other parties. They'd accidentally left behind a briefing document after a recent meeting, and it had fallen into enemy hands. It stressed the importance of social media, and laid out a strategy for pumping material out across all channels every single day between then and the elections.

Pretty much what I'd been telling Plaid Cymru Cwm Cynon we needed to do for over a year, in fact.

Anyway, the slow trickle of information continued. Ann J., who's fighting the Cwmbach ward, was fastest off the blocks. I had her information and photo within a couple of days.

Paul J., from Penywaun, is another first-rate Muggle. I bumped into him after a funeral, so I gave him my number and said I'd sit down with him and work on his biog together. So far, not a sausage.

Nor have I heard anything from Dan B. (Ynysybwl), Karen (Hirwaun), Dai (Aberdare East), Dai's wife Liz, or her father John D. (both Aberdare West). I don't even know who's been selected to fight the other seats throughout the Cynon Valley, because I haven't been to a constituency meeting or event since that night. I realised soon after leaving Mountain Ash RFC that evening that I was talking to the fucking wall, and decided to leave them to it.

I last posted something on the group's Facebook page on 10 February; the Instagram feed hasn't been updated since 29 January (me); nobody has used the Twitter account since 5 February (again, me). As for the Wordpress site … Well, I regret to inform you that it went out on the piss for St David's Day, and choked on its own vomit during the night. It seems that nobody else in the group has noticed, because I haven't had any emails asking me what's happened to it.

I've since withdrawn my long-standing offer to the Colstars to look after their Internet presence, as well. It's obvious that Derek would rather rely on an obsolete website, Facebook shares, and a few posters in key locations, to publicise their forthcoming events, than have a full-blown website with links to social media and a rolling blog with news items and features on the group.

It's obvious, too, that he doesn't want me to get involved in any way. I don't know why. We don't have any history between us; I was briefly a member of the Little Theatre group in the late 1980s, but that fell by the wayside when I started working in Treforest. I certainly wasn't party to the Great Cynon Valley Performing Arts Earthquake three decades ago, which gave birth to the Colstars in the first place, and the aftershocks of which continued to ripple down through YES, TUSC and even Showcase, none of whom were even born at the time.

Considering that every amateur dramatics group I've ever known has been crying out for older men to take to the boards, it seems nothing less than fucking rude that Derek has spurned all my attempts to get involved. My old pal Adrian T. told me a few months ago that it's a very cliquey organisation, though; if your face doesn't fit you'll never be welcome, no matter how enthusiastic you are.

(By sheer coincidence, the Colstars have just announced a fund-raising quiz this Sunday night, a couple of minutes' walk from my house. I think I'll have to have a subsequent engagement.)

My own involvement with other people's websites and social media will be limited to Alwyn's artwork site when that's up and running. At least he's going to give me a cut of his online sales, so I'll get some reward for my time and effort. Everyone else, though, is going to be rebuffed with the words NO TIMEWASTERS. Alternatively, in the words of the film, show me the money!

Faintheart

In which The Author experiences another mere coincidence

The book I'm currently working on is the third instalment in Christian Cameron's 'Age of Chivalry' series, which began with The Ill-Made Knight and continued in The Long Sword. I’d worked with Christian back in the spring, on the latest part of the 'The Long War' saga, so I was quite flattered when Orion approached me and asked me if I'd like to copy-edit his latest novel. (I won't reveal the title here, because I don't know whether it's been officially announced yet.) I'd like to think I did such a good job on The Rage of Ares that Christian himself asked if I was available. I haven't asked him directly, though. I'm not that conceited, after all.

Since I'm familiar with his style, and I'd had such a great time – buried under a mountain of books in Aberdare Library, some of which had probably been untouched since they arrived on the shelves – I jumped at the chance.

Well, I have to say that it’s been a bit like battling the Hydra. You put one query to bed, only for another two to spring up. I haven’t attempted to draw up a query sheet this time. Instead, I’ve been using the ‘Comment’ feature in LibreOffice Writer (the cheapskate’s Open Source equivalent of MS Word) to insert my Notes and Queries directly into the margin of the document.

Most of them are pretty short – 'Please see my Names Checklist', that sort of thing. A few point out homophones which have crept into the text. It happens to everyone, after all (see The Death of Rhydwen Williams in my other blog). A few of them – concerning points of historical accuracy or linguistic variations – are almost as long as the page they're pinned to.

Needless to say, I've been taking advantage of Aberdare Library's half-decent Reference section to deal with most of the obstacles I've come up against. On Thursday afternoon I took a photo of the collection of books I'd accumulated through the day, and sent it to Christian on Twitter.

(Incidentally, The Chambers Dictionary is the one I donated myself, as I told you in The Gift of Words. The Oxford Spelling Dictionary was also from my own personal stash, but when I upgraded to the latest edition I didn't need them both at home. I figured that Aberdare Library might take it off my hands, simply so they could say they had two dictionaries published after 1992.)

Anyway, I stayed there until closing time on Thursday, and didn’t bother reshelving them. Instead, I left a note on top of the pile, saying I’d be back in the morning, so they might as well stay there overnight. And on Friday morning I returned, along with five books from my own collection. I had the three Oxford University Press ‘Black Books’ -- essential parts of every proofreader’s and copy-editor’s toolkit. I also had John Julius Norwich’s book on the Popes, and a book on the Knights Templar, both of which I’d picked up in The Works in recent weeks.

I checked my emails and Christian had replied to my Tweet. Since he lives in Toronto, it came in overnight: Are all those for TGC? I replied, They're just the ones I was using yesterday. In the afternoon, I took another photo and Tweeted it to Christian, with the caption We're gonna need a bigger table.

As a matter of fact, we're gonna need a bigger library.

I had a quick look in the history section of the Lending department on Thursday afternoon. This might sound shocking, but as far as the reading public of Aberdare are aware, absolutely nothing happened in the world between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Napoleon. That extends the so-called 'Dark Ages' to nearly fourteen centuries: there's nothing on the Carolingian Renaissance, the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the Renaissance, the Wars of the Roses, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration, the American War of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution …

Even the one book which Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC Libraries do have in stock – a historical account by Judith Barker – covers the second half of the Hundred Years War. I only found that out after I'd requested a transfer. Christian's book is set during the first half. Go figure …

Anyway, the coincidence came about last night, in the Prince of Wales, of all places. Karen and I were chatting about our latest romantic disappointments: mine with Clare; hers with a chap she's keen on, but who – yeah, you've got it in one – 'just likes her as a friend'.

Karen said, 'Your trouble is that you're too much of a gentleman. Girls take advantage of you, because you're kind and good. You've got …' She hesitated for a few moments, searching for the right word. '… chivalry.'

Well, what do you make of that? Karen knew I was working on a book, but she had no idea of the content, or even the historical setting. Why on earth would she have chosen that particular word at this point in my life?

But I thought about it afterwards. As I said in The Return of the King?, I've always been a fan of King Arthur, going back to when I first encountered some of the stories in junior school. In particular, the Grail cycle is a long-standing fascination of mine. And I'm sure everybody knows the bare bones of the Grail myth, even if they haven't read the stories in much detail.

We all know that Lancelot let the side down because he couldn't keep it in his britches. Gawain was a worthy knight and a brave soul, but he failed to find the Grail. Only Galahad – pure of heart and mind and body – was vouchsafed the sight of the Grail, but even he was defeated by his own self-doubt, and the vision faded.

It's still an odd thing for Karen to say, isn't it? I certainly don't fit the description of 'chivalrous' as lived by Sir William Gold in Christian's novels, or as defined by Ramón Llull, who literally wrote the book on the subject. For one thing, with my back and shoulders, I'd be absolutely no bloody use in a fight. I'm hardly a staunch servant of our lord Jesus Christ, either. (We never did heal the schism between the early Church and the Discordian Heresy, after all.) Roistering and wenching aren't really my thing – chance would be a fine thing, as I found out last week.

But, like Sir William, I do like to meet people from different places and cultures, who've had different experiences and hold differing beliefs. My life is certainly richer as a result. In fact, just this morning I was chatting to Jamila on Facebook. I wanted to pick her brains about an aspect of Islam which crops up in the book, and which I wanted to double-check before I finalise the edit. I teased her that, throughout all her time studying Forensic Science, she probably never expected she'd be asked to act as an expert witness in a historical novel.

Anyway, that's this week's mere coincidence. Just thought you'd like to know.

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

In which The Author sees some world class athletes and jots down some ideas

This is going to be another one of those entries that starts somewhere, loops in and around on itself, and ends up somewhere else. Just so you know …

Last weekend I wished I'd actually completed my degree in Applied Biology back in the 1980s, because I could have done with cloning myself. It was karaoke in the Cambrian and Iwan's going away party on Friday night. I impressed everybody by managing to go to both and catch up with some other pals. In between singing and chatting to Iwan, I met Alan Everett, one of the stalwarts of the old Cynon Valley Quiz League. He's trying to re-establish the Sunday night competitions, and we're arranging a meeting to put things in place on 10 October. Watch this space …

On Saturday morning the Cynon Valley Museum and Gallery reopened, so I went along to check it out. It's been taken over by a trust, and is now run by a group of volunteers. Needless to say, after a week of fairly decent weather, it was absolutely pissing down on the day. The planned outdoor activities for youngsters were washed out, which is about par for the course in Wales. My pal Clint was there as the official photographer; David Leslie Davies, the respected local historian and author, was there as one of the organisers; as well as chatting to them, I bumped into some other friends while I was looking around.

It meant that by the time I got to St Elvan's Church, where Geoff was giving a talk on the Valleys connection in the Great War, he'd left by the other door. I caught up with him in the car park, and apologised for getting the time wrong. I'll definitely get around to seeing his presentation at some point, I promise.

I stayed in town for the rest of the day, because in the evening I had my third double-booking of the weekend. My friend Eirlys was having a birthday party in the Con Club, while my friend Shannon was having a going-away party in the Glosters. I stayed in the club until about 10.00, then made my way to the pub. I eventually crawled away from there some time after 2.00, leaving the youngsters to crack on into the small hours.

On Sunday evening I went to the Cambrian, where my old friend Mel Crew and another fine musician named Hugh Chidgey were hosting their monthly open mic session. Before they got going, Mel and I had a chat about the Tour of Britain. Stage 5 was set to begin at Aberdare Park, a puncture repair kit's throw from my house, on Thursday morning. Mel grew up in Nottinghamshire, and one of their local sporting heroes was a champion cyclist named Tommy Simpson. I knew his name, because his biography had been published shortly before I finished working in the book trade.

And that's where everything sort of ties in. Because here in the Cynon Valley, back in the late Victorian era, we had our own cycling hero, a chap named Arthur Linton.

I already knew there was a blue plaque on Arthur Linton's old house in Cardiff Street, Aberaman, because I photographed it a few years ago.

I didn't know much about the life of this chap until I read an essay about the Aberaman cyclists (Arthur, his brother Tom, and Jimmy Michael) in Old Aberdare Volume 5 a while ago. It's a fascinating and tragic story, which formed the basis of a play called Gladiator last year. (It came to the Coliseum, but I missed it for some reason.) Anyway, the current centrepiece of the reopened museum is an exhibition about the Aberaman cyclists. Another friend of mine, Callie Healey, has painted a marvellous portrait of Arthur Linton, working from old photographs. Some of Clint's photos are in the exhibition as well. The pieces were falling into place nicely.

Yesterday morning, dodging the showers, Rhian and I went to the park early to watch the cyclists depart on the latest stage of this gruelling tournament. Stage 5 took them from Aberdare to Bath, via the Eastern Valleys, the Forest of Dean and the Stroud Valleys. Local schooolkids had had the morning off to enjoy this remarkable occasion, and we were lucky to get a decent vantage point to watch the teams arrive.

We caught sight of Sir Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish (who is much shorter than we imagined) and a host of world-class athletes as they came up to the stand to sign in and have their photos taken with the Mayor of Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC (who is much younger than anyone imagines). I got some fairly decent photos, a few half-decent ones, and some good video footage of the competitors making their way past the statue of Industry on their way out of the park.

Then Rhian and I went for breakfast (second breakfast, in my case), decided that we really couldn't have a Silly Day, and parted company about lunchtime.

And this morning, again dodging the showers, I took a stroll up to Aberdare Cemetery and took a few photos of Arthur Linton's last resting place. The memorial was erected by public subscription after his tragic death at the age of just 27. (There was some dispute about his birthdate, apparently, and his name is mis-spelled on the memorial. Nothing much changes, does it?)