Congratulations to those of you who got A very Happy New Year from The Autolycan out of this. By happy coincidence, first up with the right answer was a lady called Angie who years ago spent many happy (happy?) hours working the switchboard in the antediluvian office I described. I had felt it wise to let her know that Dolores was not based on her but actually on her predecessor, otherwise I could have had both Angie and President Putin turning up on the doorstep wanting to do me serious harm. And yes, Angie, that is probably the first time you and Putin have ever been linked in the same sentence!
Anyway, on with pole dancing!
POLES APART
Library
turns to pole dancing to entice new readers
The
Guardian
Well,
well. What do you make of that, then? You know full well that it's
a splendid idea for a library to encourage physical fitness amongst
its local community, whilst at the same time bringing people in so
that they can borrow books, get online, drop their pre-schoolers in
for story-reading groups and so on. Of course you do. So why were
you sniggering? Because you were, weren't you? Is it because the
idea of pole dancing smacks unarguably of something smutty, no matter
how many times you Google it and find out that it doesn't have to be
anything of the sort? Or is that try as you might you can't really
imagine Mrs Philpott - who not merely ran but positively bestrode
your branch library when you were a kid – pulling off the perfect
Hands Free Chopper or Extended Frodo whilst simultaneously collecting
the tuppence you owed Middlesex County Council for returning Good
Work Secret Seven a
couple of days late?
You
remember Mrs Philpott - simple floral print dress, thinning grey hair
scraped back, reading glasses on a string round her neck – that's
her, that's the one. No matter that Middlesex County Council
skimped on cleaning costs even then, her library was always spotless,
the shelves always tidy, the books impeccably presented. Her library
was her stronghold, and you did as you were told. Or else.
Perhaps,
like me, you harbour a sneaking regard for the resolutely non-pole
dancing Mrs Philpott, who unfailingly eschewed the difficult Donut to
Superman manoeuvre in favour of stamping books, and – when you got
to know her – recommending improving tracts which she thought would
be good for you. Lots of us can be grateful to lots of Mrs
Philpotts. She helped us become children of a new decade, the 1950s.
Some of us are probably still part of that generation at heart,
hankering after Ivor the Engine, Captain Pugwash and Valerie
Singleton, or, on a good day, joining the grown ups for Michael Miles
and his wretched Yes-No interlude. Can't think why nobody ever
Opened the Box and shoved Miles into it.
Does this
strike a chord? I wonder, might you too hark back to what is
sometimes claimed as a golden era? Are you up with the twenty first
century times? Or are you just a bit behind the times, or even an
unreconstructed old git?
Let's
see. Let's take The
Autolycan a
rung or two downmarket – now, now, no silly giggling at the back
there please; Mrs Philpott may not be here in person but by God her
spirit is – and try our hand at one of those quizzes beloved of
newspaper and magazine editors when they've got to fill a space on
the cheap without all that tedious business of researching and
writing a real article. Take this test, and see how many boxes you
can tick.
HOW
FIFTIES ARE YOU?
Have
Fun Finding Out with Mrs Philpott's Fact Finder!
□
You
convert the cost of low value items such as stamps or newspapers to
shillings and pence. You then look aghast as you exclaim 'Twelve and
six! Twelve and six!! For a stamp!!'
□
You
remember London Underground trains with slam doors.
□
You
have been known to go round the house counting up the number and
types of light bulbs you've got (excluding spares.) It is vividly
remembered, though you wish it wasn't, that you then adopted an
incredulous look when comparing the totals with the paltry few your
parents managed to rub along with.
□
When
the conversation turns to The
Avengers you
say 'Diana Rigg? I remember when it was Honor Blackman.'
□
You
immediately wish you hadn't said this.
□
When
a younger person complains that it's cold you scoff 'Cold? Cold??
You should have been around in 1963!' (Bonus point if you play this
game better than I do and can truthfully say 1947.)
□
When
braking for a junction or roundabout you still change down through
the gears.
□
You
hark back to when Workington, Barrow and Gateshead had football teams
in the Third Division North. (Bonus point if you also remember that
the side finishing bottom of this league – and its counterpart in
the Third Division South – were not automatically relegated to the
Bananarama Conference or whatever it's called these days, but had to
apply for re-election to the Football League. Double bonus if your
no doubt faulty memory tells you that it was always Hartlepool United
who suffered this indignity. It can't possibly have been them every
year. Can it?)
□
Your
knowledge of how your computer works is sketchy. This does not
prevent you lambasting kids who are in the genius category by
comparison on the grounds that their grammar and spelling are a bit
shaky. (As many bonus points as you want if you share my pettest of
all hates – the use of could of, would of, should of and suchlike
enormities. It was a dark day when Microsoft deemed it necessary to
include some of these in its AutoCorrect function.)
□
You
know a lot of Adam Faith songs.
□
You
often found Sunday lunch tricky because you were convulsed with
laughter at the antics of Captain Phillips, Commander Povey, Chief
Petty Officer Pertwee and their chums. Bonus point if you also tuned
in to listen to Doc, Jet and Lemmy conduct another improbable Journey
Into Space.
□
Whenever
you see a list like this you can't help but add one or two more of
your own. Can you?
So how
did you do?
Less
than five?
(Extra bonus point if you just tutted and mentally corrected that to
'Fewer than five?' even if it does push you up – down? - into the
5-10 category.) Well done for sticking with us this far, even though
it must be a bit like talking to your parents. Or, in extreme cases,
grandparents.
Between
five and ten?
Middle of the road, eh? Could your library interest you in pole
dancing lessons, do you think? No, I thought probably not.
Over
ten?
OVER TEN, DEAR? GOOD! WELL DONE!! It's where people slither round
poles, and contort themselves into odd shapes, dear. YES! Yes, you
were JOLLY good at the foxtrot once, weren't you, but this is a bit
different. I SAID.....
The thing
is, though, that pole dancing is one of many not so weird but quite
wonderful things that libraries are getting up to these days. If
belly rather than pole dancing is your thing, there's a library for
you. Your kids want to take their teddy bears to a sleepover? No
problem - head for Edinburgh Central Library. And it's not just
books and DVDs. Oh, no. Depending on where you are libraries will
lend you all sorts of things from baking tins to telescopes, although
Bolivar County in Mississippi has apparently found out the hard way
that Father Christmas suits present a very special challenge since,
predictably perhaps, everybody tends to want them at the same time.
A
glittering star of the new order is a librarian in New York who has
achieved fame (Mrs Philpott wouldn't have approved of that) by
reading a children's story to a live alligator (or that.) This is
true; it brings the kids in, you see. Plus, I suppose, the
alligators. Wackford Squeers would have been horrified. Previous
challenges have seen her sitting in a tub of jelly and cuddling an
enormous python, although history does not record whether or not
simultaneously.
Pride of
place, though must go to a 'bookmobile' service provided by “one or
more buses or pack animals (such as burros, camels, donkeys or
elephants) furnished as small public libraries, some equipped with
internet access points or computer labs.” Leaving aside the
question of how a donkey or an elephant can come furnished as
anything, or be equipped with an internet access point (what do you
suppose the average elephant's broadband speed is?) there is the
small matter of how your local Council, down on its uppers as it is,
is going to feed and stable this unlikely menagerie, whilst avoiding
the kind of violent confrontations that tend not to go down well in
reading rooms. Edinburgh would have a particular problem, what with
having to worry about the transport squashing the teddy bears, while
New York would face an even tougher challenge making sure the visual
aids didn't try to eat the transport.
Mrs
Philpott would have known how to deal with all this. She would of
course have scored maximum points on the quiz, if not more, and would
have had no truck with Father Christmas suits, teddy bear sleepovers,
alligators and the like. But she knew a thing or two, did Mrs
Philpott. One of the things she would have known without having to
look it up is what a burro is; another would have been where to dig
out the lowdown on how and where to find bed and breakfast for a
Wifi-enabled camel in Middlesex in the 1950s. For all I know her
card index system would also have had at its fingertips the gen on
how to crank an elephant up to 150 Mbs. Go on, have a look –
Google can't do all that.
It was
pretty much infallible, that card index system of hers. It would
have been more than equal to the task of finding tips on whether the
budding pole dancer would be better off with a static X-Pole Sport or
pushing the boat out with a spinning X-Pole Xpert - or even where to
stock up on essentials like Gorilla Snot Grip (I'm not making this
up, or at least not that bit.)
But, like
the best pole dancers, she would never have overreached herself. She
would, you might say, have been in pole position to tackle the
multifarious challenges facing the modern library, but – as you now
know – she wouldn't have touched them with a dance pole.
ANAGRAM
CORNER
A tribute to.....
SIR
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
HI,
ADORED SORTA TV BIG'UN!
Sorta?
Well, it is in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary and
Thesaurus!
