After my enforced day working from home, so I do not Expend More Energy Than I Have, I decide to get the train into town to meet MindReader and to go to the library.
I get to the library and am informed I must pay my fines before I can get ANY books out. Now, I happen to think £5 a month on fines is just actually quite a low price subscription to a building full of books. MindReader doesn’t agree. Especially when, to avoid the fine, all I actually have to do is click a box on the internet.
I am very lazy.
“I’ll pay it now then,” I say, spraying spare change everywhere as I get my library card out. My bag hits me in the face as I bend down to pick it all up and I briefly curse my very full purse.
The man is tall and has blond hair that falls from his bald crown in a very straight curtain of hair all around his head. He keeps up a stream of commentary about pressing F1 and opening the till and closing the till and pressing enter and giving me my change and so on. The whole process takes so long that I decide to sort my purse out.
I take everything out and start a pile on the desk for debit cards, lip balm, coins and library cards and a pile for things I don’t want to keep, like old receipts and old train tickets and so on.
Stick with it.
I look up, and the man is staring very intently at the screen. “I have never known anyone get so many books out so often,” he says. “Do you read them all?”
I smile. “Yes,” I say.
“You must read for – what,” he says, looking at the screen again, “hours and hours a day?”
I think briefly back to last night, three in the morning and turning the light back on to read again before another attempt at sleep. “About right,” I say.
I leave the library with ten more books and meet MindReader in Starbucks where I asked for an almond latte and got a whole milk latte.
We dash for the train and I sit probably slightly too close to MindReader, hoping for cuddles.
“Tickets please,” the ticket-man says.
In my mind’s eye I see the self-righteous I-am-cleaning-my-purse-out pile of train tickets in the bin in the library.
“Oh, God,” I say.
one of my favorite quotes ever is still me saying ooh i love the library, it’s full of free books and your response of, “ohhh they’re not free!”