Save your local library - and cheer yourself up!

If you’re suffering from the cold days and long dark nights and even the thought of increasing daylight doesn’t raise a smile upon your gloomy visage. If the news about the recession, depression, job losses, unemployment, strikes and all round misery is getting to you, then read a book!

These days books are cheap: there are the BOGOFF ones in the supermarket and discount book shops, you can go to your local charity shop and spend less that £1 on a darned good read. Or go online and choose from literally millions of titles from the world’s biggest book retailer. Or you can put your money away and go to the library ….

Ahem. Did you hear me?

When was the last time you visited a library? If you haven’t got kids under ten, you’re not retired or on the sick, unemployed, a student, or a poverty stricken writer like myself, I bet the answer isn’t in the last month. Have you visited a library in the last year? Two years? Ok, since you were a student, unemployed, your kids were young ….

What a shame!

With the government hacking arts, council and all-round funding, libraries are suffering and they need people to show that they give a damn. John Harris wrote a fantastic piece in the Guardian on 11^th January about the new ‘Big Society’ answer to the problem – i.e. we buy the libraries and run them ourselves. Have a read through and see what you think:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/11/north-yorkshire-libraries-cuts-closures-big-society

In the end, libraries may not survive this period of austerity if people don’t show they are bothered. Not all areas have a group of nice people who are willing to take on the responsibility. I think we have forgotten how important libraries have been to the cultural life – and probably the mental health – of people in this country, especially when times are hard. Just think, you can go into a library and (WITHOUT SPENDING A PENNY!!) choose from hundreds of books on all manner of subjects; you can read today’s paper, go online for an hour and apply for jobs, email friends or look something up. You can find out about the history of your town, borrow the latest Man Booker prize winner … For a small charge, you can borrow a CD or a DVD; attend a talk or a reading on subjects from local history to healthy eating. Libraries are FANTASTIC places and they have been set up for us, out of our hard earned money. Why on earth would you not want to take advantage of them?

For years, I was sustained by the local library. My mum joined me as soon as I could read; she took me every week and I still remember to this day that lovely dusty musty smell of the Children’s department of Woolton Village Library in Liverpool. I used to feel such a thrill of excitement when we walked down the steps (it was in the basement) to be confronted by the shelves of books. Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, then Daphne Du Maurier, William Golding, the Brontes, Austin, Dickens … As I grew older, I tried the great European classics by Dostoyevsky, Emil Zola and Marcel Proust. I read philosophy, poetry and history, science and art books, as well as fiction, drama and poetry. How lucky I was to have this introduction to the world of books – and all for nothing. I still feel that heady thrill when I walk into the (recently refurbished) library in Hebden Bridge.

Now I take my children, though the new children’s section is Hebden is an aeon away from that dark and dismal cellar I used to visit. With bright rugs and chairs, computer access and the option to have a cup of hot chocolate, this is a place to hang out and meet friends. There is even a teenage section with all the latest fiction series and graphic novels. Well known authors come and give talks and the kids are encouraged to visit more often by the library staff giving out sticker books and free gifts during the summer months. I hope that this new generation of readers will appreciate this gem on their highstreet more than many of their parents do. But perhaps when we wake up and realise that perhaps we can slim down our household budgets and enter a whole new world of reading, then the trickle of visitors today will turn into a stampede.

As the Save Our Libraries campaign goes: ‘If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.’ So cheer yourself up – and show you care. Get your mac on and brave the wind and the rain to visit your local library. I hear there’s a very good book out called Amelia And The Virgin …..