The only thing I've missed in lockdown, apart from hugging my adult offspring, is the library. Pre-COVID, most weeks saw me at the magnificent City Library, picking up books I reserved weeks ago and forgot about, browsing the shelves, returning whatever I’m done with.
Free public lending libraries (which are up there with free public health and education as a mark of a civilized society I reckon) closed their doors, and even their external returning chutes, early on in the ISO experience. I was shattered. Had there been warning, I would have stocked up, as I do before the summer holls when I borrow around 20 books to see me through. If there’s not a word for an irrational fear of running out of reading matter, there should be.
Granted, I have a house full of books, an embarrassing number of which I haven’t read, but we are on the cusp of moving house, and most of them are taped up in packing crates.
Inspiration struck as I remembered the many ‘Little Lending Libraries’ in my immediate neighbourhood – those charming boxes, often sweetly decorated by local kids, where people leave the books they are finished with and pick up another couple while they’re there.
I trawled the streets and netted quite a catch.
I discovered a terrific new author – Marti Leimback – who wrote Daniel isn’t talking, is a funny, fierce, excoriating, tender novel about a mother’s fight for adequate support for her severely autistic son. I rediscovered the genius of Susan Hill. I scored an Ann Patchett I hadn’t read. I bagged a PD James that was new to me, and that set me off on a spree of rereading old detective classics. I discovered to my delight that I can’t remember who dunnit after a couple of years, so all my favourite sleuthing tales are available to me once more – freshly minted as it were.
Which led to a binge on one of the Queens of the Golden Age of detective fiction – New Zealander Ngaio Marsh who is more English than the English. It was in one of her books that I discovered this sentence which delighted me:
Nobody got up very early at Frantock on Sunday mornings. Nigel, wandering down to breakfast at half-past nine, found himself alone with the sausages.
So, I’m all set for a while now. But I’m hoping libraries will be one of the first places to reopen post-lockdown. Little local lending libraries are great, but they won’t keep me going for ever.