The Creased Pages

There's something I mention now and again on my Twitter and Facebook pages, which I realise I never fully explained. I tweeted about bits of it at the time, but I've never told the full story in one place. For me, it was one of the most memorable (and honestly frightening) experiences of my life. That makes it sound really dramatic, and I don’t mean to make this sound like an X Factor style sob story. I just want to share my account of it fully, in a way that cannot be expressed effectively in 140 characters or less.

Hello! How are you? Good? Good! I'm great too, thanks for asking! So, it's been a while, hasn't it? Sort of. Feels like it. Let me catch you up on the (not many) new things that have happened since I came back from my trip to Southampton. I got a new job! Kind of. I'm doing casual work for the 'Customer Contact' people, who joined forces with the library back in October - basically my job is to sit at the desk in the ICT suite every morning until 11.30 and monitor the computers: log people on if they need me to, take money for printing, etc. Originally, it was going to be temporary, just until the end of May, but I hope they carry it on further, because it's quite an enjoyable bit of work, really. I used to do it last summer, before the library was converted into a community hub, and it was actually my favourite part of the job. It almost makes me feel powerful, sat behind a desk, and I'm left to it, given the independence I prefer when I'm ...

I don't necessarily have a great deal of things to say in this post. See, I'm on a train at the moment - going from Southampton Central to Clapham Junction - going home after having just spent three nights in a Southampton hotel on my own. I don't think I've ever felt so lonely. Okay, I admit, I loved having my own space - a hotel room to myself, a working TV on which I could watch anything I wanted... I didn't even feel the need to lock the bathroom door when I went to the loo! It was great to have that kind of freedom, I'd been craving it for a while.

There are so many things we take for granted in life. Clean running water. Having the freedom to make our own decisions in life. The deliciousness of the skin on KFC chicken! Very rarely do we actually stop to think about what it would be like without these things. There is one particular luxury I think we should dedicate more of our attention to: the library. It's possible that some people may not realise quite how lucky we are to have libraries dotted all over the country for us to make use of at our leisure.