And then I will go to work. In the gloom and the cold. And for what? I have three degrees, my job is of the professional sort that needs post-graduate qualifications (allegedly. It probably doesn’t) and yet, eheu, I get paid less than the ‘three A-levels please’ post in the admin offices the main duties of which are entering room-bookings into a spreadsheet (If I am very lucky and work very hard, I could be promoted into middle-management, and still get paid very little (no one gets paid much in Libraries) for doing a job I will now loathe. There are no more promotions without management. Management is mandatory. Even if it gives you hives).

And while I’m whining, the damned commute takes over an hour, and it’s not the sort of commute where you can sit down comfortably and read a good book. You can, if you like, be squashed uncomfortably and drop your good book irretrievably under the hooves of your fellow commuters. So I get paid really not very much for seven hours a day, and the job actually takes over ten hours of my day off me, ten hours in which I do not get to do that which I want to do. No, I can’t do what I want to do in my lunch-break. I have to eat lunch, go to the bank/chemist/supermarket/card-shop/weird-place-that-sells-CD-cases, check my non-work emails, use the loo, avoid the more talkative of my colleagues, read the good book always assuming I didn’t drop it, and generally decompress because sharing an open-plan office for more than three hours on the trot makes me feel like screaming ‘everyone get out of my room! Now! Stop breathing my air! Stop breathing my air!’

The strange thing is, I like my job. I really do. I can actually do my job without spraining anything, but it’s not so easy it’s brain-mincingly dull and repetitive. My colleagues are rather nice (some of them are very nice; a few are nuts. It balances out). My boss is very kind and understanding about my ugly health issues and need to take two or three days off every month in order to lie on the bathroom floor (it’s less hassle than going back to bed between gastric revolts). Every now and then the Powers That Be cut our funding by another eight trillion percent, and we all run around in small circles shouting ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ while our jobs specs are hastily re-written for us, but so far none of us have been fired or made redundant against our wishes. And there’s a recession on, so having a job is really quite wonderful.

And mid-day people-overload freak-outs aside, I do go a bit weird if I spend days on end at home with no one to try to look sane infront of.

So I usually shut myself up at this point. I have a job, the job is good, good is the job, all is good.

I just wish I hadn’t wasted all the time I did have, back when I had it, on not knowing what I wanted to do with it. I don’t think I ever meant to spend it on commuting and wishing my colleagues would bloody answer their mobile phones.

Going to bed now. Sorry.

While we’re waiting, I shall therefore do the easy thing and make some points that have been boiling within my breast for, ooh, most of my career in librarianship, really.

So, Dear Assorted Persons Who Ought To Know Better:

1. Alphabetical order is not an amusing foible only some of your colleagues indulge in. If things are not filed in the correct order, we cannot find them, and those of us that give a monkeys about customer service find it mildly distressing to have to tell a reader we can’t find their request/library card/application form/complete works of Charlotte M. Yonge.
2. Dear reader, seriously? Your email account is eating your library reminders, yes, very frustrating I’m sure, but seriously? You expect us to waive your weeks and weeks-worth of fines because you didn’t know when the books were due back without the email from the library? Despite the due-date stamped firmly on the label in neat black ink? Oh, you do expect us to waive them. Well, I shan’t, and what’s more, I think you’re a twerp, and further to that, the fact your email account went kablooey neatly proves exactly why the email reminders are a courtesy only and the lack of them is in no way proof that your books don’t need renewing.
3. Commuters of London! I will buy a pair of pinking shears and cut through each and every one of your goddamn headphone wires if you don’t turn your MP3 players down right now. [Nothing to do with libraries, but still. Worth saying].
4. I wish I didn’t have to shush your children, shush you, grab your toddler before he falls down the stairs (where the hell were you?), rescue your hat from the top of the stacks (he was hot. So he threw his hat in the air. I know), stop you climbing up the book-shelves (are you trying to kill yourself? There’s a kick-stool right there), dissuade you from looking at porn on the internet, dissuade you from playing WarShovel (or whateverthehell you call it) on the internet with the sound on, ask you to hold your domestic arguments elsewhere, or pick up dozens and dozens of books you have pulled off the shelves and dropped onto the floor when they turned out to be of no interest to you. This is a University, damn it, not a crèche.
5. I will put away my data entry and pay full attention to you when you put away your iPhone and pay full attention to me. Deal?
6. If you dump a pile of books in front of me with no comment, I will ask you whether you want them returned, renewed, or lent. I’m not sure why you find this offensive. I find your slamming things down in front of me and staring haughtily at the wall behind me offensive, for that matter. Do I mutter ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ under my breath? No, I do not. I merely think it.
7. The next person to remark, however jovially, that it must be lovely, working in a library, sitting about reading books all day, will be summarily disembowelled and hung on the ramparts as a warning to others.

And that’s only the minor snits and irritations, folks! Aren’t you glad I didn’t get started on funding cuts, those lying twat-weasel Lib Dems and their ‘no tuition fees!’ u-turn, and the fact even some of the lecturers are bloody illiterate woo-merchants these days [This last remark does not in any way apply to any of the teaching staff at Reed's place of employment, who are all very literate and clever indeed (Reed, you arse, do you want to get fired?)].

Maybe I shan’t bother. After all, eating dinner off a packing-case and making a bed out of sofa-cushions and sleeping-bags is quite fun, isn’t it?

But I have a new template! I have been thinking Big Thoughts about the template for months now [She is not kidding. Not even a little bit - Ed]. An Ideal Template, of course, would be winsome yet authoritative. Funny yet high-minded. Just a tad geeky, seeing as geeky is cool, yet classic. Hinting at long nights of Turkish coffee and political discussion in chic slightly distressed apartments in Paris or possibly New York, yet down-to-earth, cosy as an Amish quilt and smelling of cocoa and lavender.

Eh.

How about this one? It’s… well. It’s Not Annoying. And I can play with the pictures in the header. I’m happy.

So, where have I been, while this blog grew toadstools and the mice chewed its edges?

It’s a crappy question. Well, it’s not a crappy question, but the answer is crappy and can get out of hand and next thing you know you’re holding my hand and passing me tissues and refilling my glass with gin all at once while I repeat ‘no, no, I’m fine in an increasingly shrill and wobbly voice. Aren’t you glad there’s all this internet in the way?

When I last crashed out of this blog, I crashed back in again to let you all know that while doing my MA in Librarianship, I had finally-at-last-hurrah gotten pregnant, and then lost the baby, which broke my heart. Since that time, I have had four more miscarriages. Given that my heart was already broken, they between them broke me instead. I am not entirely like the Reed of old. I am a very tired Reed. I find writing creatively painfully hard now, and have written very little poetry or done much to my novel drafts. I work full-time, in a more senior post at the same old library (the MA was useful). Whole days spent reading or dicking about with wool and needles? No longer exist. And my health has not in the least improved – my insides are a mess, and I am in violent, not-even-the-morphine-touches-it, throwing-up-and-passing-out pain from time-to-time.

OK, that last paragraph was fairly foul, wasn’t it? Cheer up, it’s over now, and you don’t have to read it again.

On the plus side, I do have a full-time job, which in this Age of Scary Economy is a blessing and a marvel. I am still married to S, who is still wonderful and adorable (and currently has a vile stinking cold and looks utterly miserable, poor sod). I still have all my own teeth and no fillings. And I still have internet access. So.

What to write about tomorrow, that’s the question.

When I tell you we do not have that particular journal in the library, I do not mean we do have it, but I’m not telling you where. I do not mean we could have it, and it would take me a minute to run down the road to the newsagents with the petty cash biscuit tin and get you a copy – academic journals, after all, cost something like £30 or £40 an issue, and that’s not counting the scientific ones, whose invoices make me faint on a regular basis, and anyway, we order most of them in from specialist suppliers who live in the internet. I do not mean I don’t want you to have it. I do not mean anything at all beyond the stark, basic, ‘we do not have this journal’. If you like, I’ll agree that it’s annoying and that you must be very frustrated. Did that help you feel better? No? In any case, please hush about the damned journal. Standing there complaining at me is having no more useful effect than making me both tetchy and nauseated. Go home and wash instead, and make the world a happier place.

Dear Considerably Less Smelly Patron,

Yes, you do have a library fine on this book. It was due back at the end of October. Yes, you told me you had it renewed, but, please remember, you told me you had it renewed at the beginning of October, which would make it due back at the end of October. Which it was. It is now the end of November. Yes, we do offer a week’s grace on late returns. Indeed. To avoid a fine, therefore, you should have returned or renewed this book in the first week of November. This is the last week of November. No, I am afraid that your having spent August abroad is no reason whatsoever for me to waive this fine. You hadn’t even borrowed the book in the first place in August.

Dear Whatever On Earth You Think You Are,

This is a library. Not your GP’s consulting room. I cannot see anything even beginning to resemble a magic staple in your upper arm. Please put your shirt back on and go away.

Dear Patron Who Is Probably Quite Normal,

The fact you are smiling at me and saying please and thank you does not alter the fact you are now asking me to look something up on the catalogue for you for the seventeenth time this afternoon. Pay attention. Type the author’s surname in the box marked ‘author’. Press return. See? Now you try. What do you mean you can’t find anything? Ah. We discussed this at go five, go eight, and goes eleven to fifteen inclusive. If you spell ‘Austen’, ‘Austin’ one more time I will accidentally delete your library record.

Dear Patron Who Is Being Extremely Reasonable Considering,

Yes, the lift is out of order. Again. Indeed, that makes twice in one week. Yes, we have called the engineer. We have been calling the engineer since ten o’clock this morning. I am well aware you simply can’t get up the stairs and that the lift breakage has basically locked you out of your library. I am deeply annoyed on your behalf, and I would quite like to slap the engineer upside the head. When I have finished slapping the muggins who installed the bloody lift all wrong in the first place. All I can do is offer you a ping-pong bat and a place in the queue.

With all good wishes to you all,

Yours sincerely,

Reed’s headache

[This applies in any case, as if, God forbid, this is all still up in ten years time, someone could be reading it then. Reed doesn't always think things through, you know - Ed]

The Editor is feeling particularly sprightly this soul-destroyingly dank evening because we – we hope – defeated the subject headings [by a very narrow margin indeed] and handed in what we fondly assume to be a reasonable piece of coursework. [Ah, but we assumed, not so fondly, that the last piece of classification coursework was arse-gravy from beginning to end and got an A for it, so narrative causality expects bitter sobbing some time soon after Christmas]. And as the Editor is waxing (not lyrical. Just, waxing) and as we are Waiting for Internet, we two are spending the evening arguing about, alas, boots (as in, the old ones pinch, and can we have new ones when the Internet comes?). S has been delegated the role of Unfortunate Boy Bearing Messages, but luckily we still have the kettle, so he also brings tea and no one has thumped him yet.

I do hope the Internet does come soon. I’ve saved this post for it.

[Do any of you have a clue what she's drooling on about?]

I know, I know, I should have done my homework last week. But just think, if I had, I’d no longer be me, would I? I’d be a pod person, and that involves running screaming into traffic, and I am just not in the mood.

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?

Like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, I never learnt to read. My mother remembers playing with flash-cards with me when I was two or three, but I simply do not remember not being able to read, or being taught in any way. At six, I had a reading age of twelve, at twelve, of an adult, as an adult, I now have the reading age of a depressed adolescent geek.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?

Currently? Course books on Management and Computing. Dear God, but is writing in English an ability not vouchsafed to anyone who knows what a policy documentation trail is?

3. What are your library habits?

I work in a library. I am studying librarianship. I prowl libraries territorially. I rearrange the shelves if they’ve got out of order even in the local public library. I belong to five libraries. I max out all my library cards on a regular basis. You could say I have boundary issues when it comes to libraries.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?

I grew up a long long way from a library, in a land where libraries were not so much of a big deal. And then, age ten, I went to a school with a library and, oh my, I could read any of it, all of it, take it home if I liked… Hooked. Since then, I have always thrown myself into all and any available libraries with desperate abandon. I don’t think much has altered since that first magical visit. Oh, apart from all the books on HTML now littering the floor around the computer. Never thought that would happen.

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?

I had meant to do more reviews, which meant I started reading more thematically, but, really, I read but I don’t think these days. I do see other people’s reviews and make mental notes, but did I mention lack of thinking? Notes all lost. Carpet fluff in there. Sorry.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from new book stores, second hand book stores, the library, online exchange sites, online retailers, other?

10% new (huge and huge and gigantic and huge bookshop right next door to work. Tempty tempty), 5% second hand, 70% library, 10% online retailers, and I suppose the rest are gifts.

7. How often do you read a book and not review it on your blog? What are your reasons for not blogging about a book?

I rarely blog about my reading because, actually, I am too darn chicken. I always meant to. It was one of the original aims of the blog. But alas I have such a horror of looking shallow, or unperceptive, or dim, or having anyone judge my reading habits. This sounds a little wet, really [A little? A little? - Ed]. I know. But you haven’t grown up being told you are as nothing, as nothing, d’you hear? until you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov. And this at an age when Narnia is so much more… appealing. Nope. Still haven’t read Dostoevsky.

8. What are your pet peeves about the way people treat books?

Writing in books. Even in pencil. Folding paper-backs in half at the spine (which, of course, rips all the pages out of the spine and makes the cover permanently warped). Leaving books lying around for hours, days, open and face-down. Again, screws the spine permanently. Using those metal giant paper-clip-like ornamental book-marks – they always tear a page in the end.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?

Of course not! [Bwahahahah!]

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?

I try to think what they like, what they’ve liked in the past, what they have already, and basically spin round and round in the middle of the shop until my brain explodes and I have to go and recover in a coffee-shop. Sometimes I get self-rightous and give books I think they ought to read. I try to control this urge, but, hey, certain people just need telling.