POLES APART

Hello, and welcome to February's Autolycan, which is about pole dancing, so - as you can imagine - Master Autolycus has had to tread carefully!  But before we get on to that, you may remember that January's edition ended with an anagram which I wondered if you could solve.  The story was about Tim Peake getting a wrong number from the Space Station and the anagram was Yay! Welcome! Pray have another fun party! (1,4,5,3,4,4,3,9)

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!