libraries

I always feel completely at home in any public library - I suppose it's because I've spent so much time in them over the years. My parents didn't have much money, but they were took me to the children's library in Oxford as soon as I was old enough. I can't remember not being able to read, and have always been a pretty voracious reader, so the library was a treasure chest and I spent hours in there. My parents used to drop me off while they went shopping from a pretty early age - you could do that in those days - and I made the most of it. The holy grail was finding an Enid Blyton book on the shelves - she was so popular that her books were always out, but I discovered other children's authors, Ruby Ferguson was one, I remember - I loved her books, which were all about girls with ponies on Romney Marsh, and I adored school stories. It amuses me to read that children's books should be 'relevant' - why? Nothing could be further away from my life than the pre-war girl's boarding school, but I was addicted to them. I suppose stories about friendships, bullying etc. are universal wherever you are, and the Harry Potter phenomenon is testament to the fact that the boarding school still has a hold on the childish imagination. I suppose it's the fact it's a self-contained world where adults are entirely peripheral and their world is merely incidental, so it can provide a convincingly child-centred universe.
Oxford built a new, modern, much larger library and that's where I first took my children. I don't remember too much about it - the old library remains a much more vivid memory. As soon as we moved to Bristol in 1983 I discovered the Central Library on College Green, a magnificent building which retains the original Edwardian grandeur. It's surroundings have improved enormously in recent years - traffic is banned from outside and attractive fountains and flower beds are nearby, and it's recently been expensively refurbished and reorganised. I'm sorry that so much space is now given up to DVDs but I suppose libraries have to find ways in which to survive. I still love going there, mooching around the shelves, and I can see myself spending more and more time there as I get older.
Now, the reference library upstairs - it's magnificent! It has lovely big old desks and capacious, comfortable chairs. It's not what it was and has had to make room for the music library which was expelled from the ground floor and is now a shadow of its former self. But you can still spend hours in there reading ancient bound copies of magazines and newspapers and probably much else. There's always plenty of retired people doing family history research and much else I expect. The whole place a comfortable, well-used public service and I always feel as if I've come home whenever I go there. Public libraries are a repository of ecverything good about our society and I feel sure they wouild probably fail every one of the government-inspired financial 'public use' audits. It's hugely important that we keep them, use them, preserve them ,develop them - do whatever has to be done for them - they're a necessity, a public service in the most fundamental sense. Maybe not quite as important as water and sewerage, as demonstrated by the recent floods but still a vitally important part of public life.