Secret shelves

"Yes I'd love to come to the meeting...but...I'd be at a loose end in town for three hours". Not a prospect I relished at this time of year. Not only have I never really grasped the concept of shopping as a form of entertainment, but one of the three hours would fall in that awkward lull you get in every British city between the shops closing and the "evening economy" firing up. Two of the hours would be after dark, and all three would be cold. And windy. Then I remembered a conversation from earlier in the day:

"There's a library round the back of the_"
"Really?? Open to the public?"
"Yes. Until quite late. It's the City Archives. Anyone can go in"

I left my investigations til after dark. The building's less than a hundred yards from the nearest shops, after all. But you have to know where you're going: there's no light. There are lawns (black), gravel paths (audible), a couple of small car-parks (tenebrous) and, so I'm reliably informed, a legion of legless Roman soldiers marching silently through a basement off to the left somewhere. I feel distinctly under-dressed: my coat should be longer, my hair blacker and my face paler. I walk past a tramp who's looking through some large commercial bins, and then through a gateway in some iron railings ("CCTV in operation") into a velvet-black garden. The tramp decides that lost-looking people are more interesting than bins, and comes over: though he talks with some difficulty, he's obviously "in" on this Archive lark.

He tells me the velvet garden's infradig and if I'm looking for the library the door's just round there. I nearly walk in through a brightly-lit window: the door's right next to it, in complete darkness. It looks like the sort of door that usually has a sign on it saying "Do Not Use This Door". But it's unlocked.

Inside it's wine-chiller cool. There are huge heaters, in theory, but the heat simply soaks into the mediaeval walls never to be heard of again. The staff at the reception desk take time to explain what I can find here, but it all just goes in one ear and out the other as I marvel at how such a place can carry on existing just a hundred yards from shops that are desperate to sell anything to avoid going under with the high rents.

The huge tomes in the first room I investigate, are records from parishes all over the country. I spend some time looking for any of the (many) places with which I have any connection, but draw a blank and start to look for some science. What I find there, quite by chance, are some real eye-openers. J.S. Haldane pondering the social and ethical dilemmas that are (or at least, should be) still alive in science today. A fascinating account of the perils of how the then-new (late 30s) chemically-assisted agriculture renders soil weak and sterile, which wouldn't have looked out of place in this month's Permaculture Magazine. Who knows, if I'd been able to carry on looking, I might even have come across Farmers of Forty Centuries, (celebrating its centenary this year) in which the soil is named as the "staying power" behind China's achievement as the only ancient superpower still extant in modern times.

But it was throwing-out time at the Archives, and anyway I had a meeting to go to.

Sacred space

For some reason, I only noticed the Facebook post the night before it was all due to start. I hadn't really been following any local news about the "biggest strike in a generation": how can you go on strike when you haven't got a job? But it was November, people would be standing outside from before dawn on the picket-lines, and the local wing of UK Uncut were organising a run of hot drinks and snacks. I signed up to help. What better way for someone unemployed to go "on strike" than by getting up at 6:15 and going to work?

The morning was still, dark and quiet. I passed two sets of pickets on the way into town: one at the Police station and one, of all places, at the Barracks. Who would police the day's march and rally? And what would the local regiment of Ghurkhas look like out on strike?

The venue for the tea-making had been described as a "Church Hall" but I pushed open a large arched door to find myself in the nave of what appeared to be a fully functioning church, complete with altar, crucifixes and the beginnings of a congregation. There were even hymn numbers on a board on the wall. But there was a bike-trailer parked in the middle of the room: this must be the right place. I recognised the Pastor: he had made a brilliant speech at a rally in the summer comparing wealth inequality to the suffering in a flood. It had moved me to tears. Now he is letting us use his church as HQ. There's a map spread out on the altar with all the locations of the pickets. They hadn't known about the barracks.

The kitchen was up some steps beyond the altar: thus, all the worshippers would have unwittingly been addressing their devotions to the Place of Food. And we're not talking just tea and biscuits here: we're making bacon butties, veggie sausages, and I got the plate-warmer up and running so that they could go out hot to the front lines. Someone had even brought a thermal picnic bag. Pickets had been briefed: they could phone and ask for food any time between 8:00 and 10:00 am. I stuffed bacon and sausages that someone else had fried, into buns which I then wrapped and counted into bags. Bikes and cars took them all over the city in the early morning sunshine: I hadn't realised how many government outposts there were here.

"Six bacon butties and two veggie sausages!!" A journalist from London came to the door and asked if our effort was being appreciated on the picket-lines but nobody had heard him and that was the first answer he got. We gave our stories. The strike, the backup and the public support were covered as a New Social Phenomenon the following day.

And no wonder: the breathing-space at the end of a working life, just like the one at the end of the working week, is part of life's pattern. You might try and remove it temporarily in times of war, but expecting 68-year-old dusties to lift our heavy boxes of bottles, or 68-year-old police to chase burglars, just because somebody in a bank isn't very good at risk assessment, is a poor show. Especially when, as in the Pastor's metaphorical flood, the people at the bottom go under, while those at the top lose nothing at all.

Ripper

Sometimes people waiting at stations do odd things that stick in your memory. During one particular wait, standing in a shelter, I became aware of the sound of paper being ripped. Oddly, this was not followed by the obvious next steps of crumpling or binning the paper. And the ripping was being done at a slower, more deliberate pace than I am used to.

I looked up from my newspaper to follow the sound. It came from a magazine being read by a smartly-dressed middle-aged man, who happened to be sitting facing away from me. As I looked, he read one page, then having read it he very deliberately tore it out of the magazine, then into four squares, and then slid the four ragged pieces into the plastic sleeve in which the magazine, obviously some kind of professional publication in the field of his work, had been delivered. The next page received the same treatment. And the next. Most of the pages, as is usual in that type of publication, were liberally illustrated with photographs of smart, smiling people who were obviously "moving on up", and whose tales of success were being used partly by themselves as a networking excercise, but mainly by the industry "pour encourager les autres".

I began to wonder what particular industry was being featured. The cover of the magazine was obviously long gone, and I was too far away to read the articles. What I could tell, though, was that it would have been perfectly possible, and far quicker, to simply turn each page rather than tear it into quarters. The magazine would then have easily fitted back into its plastic sleeve, rather than forming an ungainly lump as it was now beginning to.

The reading and slow tearing went on until the entire magazine had been devoured. The shelter was quite crowded, and I wondered if anyone else had noticed this little tableau, and if so whether they, like me, had begun to find it disturbing. How often does anyone in the normal course of life deliberately rip up an image of somebody's face?

Perhaps I'm just a bit too sensitive. Perhaps dealing with people was not a strong point of this particular individual, or the line of work in which he found himself. Perhaps I'll not look up right now, because I am just too damn curious about what this man does for a living, and want to catch the words on the front of that sleeve in the split second between its being turned over, and being slipped into a briefcase...blink!

Human Resources Magazine

Angelic umbrellas

Party fundraising season is with us once again. While for some this means plush dinners at £60 a head, for others such as our little party £6 gets you in to a lively gig with local bands happy to play for beliefs rather than hard cash, in the back bar of our local Picturehouse. And an excellent evening it was, too.

At the end of the evening, a group of us decided to walk home: it was a mild, windless night and our definition of "walking distance" is somewhat elastic. But my confidence (backed up by a glance at the forecast earlier that day) that it wouldn't rain, had turned out to be misplaced. Well, that's Climate Change for you.

Bring on the Angelic umbrellas. They were large, white, and standing in a wooden latticework box behind a leather sofa by the door: I hadn't spotted them on my way in. Anyone faced with the prospect of otherwise getting wet could help themselves to one, no matter how long or variagated their journey home. I was amazed: didn't this little enterprise cost the Picturehouse a small fortune in wayward brolly replacement?

Elinor Olstrom won her Nobel Prize for proving scientifically that this needn't be the case. A "common resource" (fisheries, fields, umbrellas) can be managed by its users, without the need for a typical "top-down" commercial or government set-up, as long as there is some other well-defined social structure, made up of its users, which is as large as the resource in question.

And so I wonder, how big is the Picturehouse Social Structure (note no attempts at an acronym!)? And how strong is our sense of belonging? Do we all think of the place as just a commercial enterprise (in which case we'd nick the brollies: "after all, we've paid for them"), or does it count for more than that? After all, people meet in its foyer and bars, and see classic "everyone should see" films (Walkabout, Apocalypse Now, Metropolis), which make it something of a social and cultural space as well as just a business.

And would you nick brollies from your own and your mates' social-and-cultural-space? 'Course not.

Image blagged with thanks, from "Fresh Eyes On London"

Mind the Gap

There isn't really any excuse for a three-month gap in posting, so I'm not going to offer one.

But the Plot is coming along nicely: there are spuds, giant broccoli, tomatoes, strawberries, and reams of beans. Nearly all of these have suffered some horrble setback near the beginning of their lives, as I start to learn about things like Pigeons, Rabbits, Bindweed, and other pests the like of which one never has to deal with an an ordinary garden.

One evening, round about the time of the London Riots, a hot spell here in Viking City broke into a specatacular rainstorm. The following day I found out that some of the local likelies, apparently having had their barbecue rudely interrupted by unwanted water, had picked up their fire and come and taken shelter in the shed on the Plot. The fire itself was in one of those large old-fashioned metal bread tins. The shed is always unlocked, so nothing has to be broken in order to get in. We have kept it that way ever since discovering, one morning, a twentysomething victim of the recession who had apparently needed it and who had had the decency, and the good sense, to leave it undamaged.

Unfortunately, the local likelies weren't quite so thoughtful. Not bothering to realise that a metal tin with a fire in it is hot on the outside as well as the inside, they set it down on the shed's wooden floor rather than put it up on bricks like a barbecue. And it burned right through, leaving a large, ragged hole.

I took it philosophically: at least a hole in the floor won't let the rain in. But other Plotters said I should tell the Police, so I did.

So there are now files, fingerprints, DNA samples, and a large metal bar plus lock which we have been given to put on the shed door. Rumours of a CCTV programme are floating around. In other words, a lot of extra work for everybody involved (including the likelies, who I presume will shortly find themselves on a Community Payback stint).

I'm fairly laid-back about people using things, as long as no malice is intended and no damage is done. We all do it. Anyone who eats food, or uses energy, is using their surroundings just like the people who used our shed.

The trick is not to burn holes in it, guys.

The man who lost the plot

I never met him. Whoever he was, he had apparently been using his allotment as a tree-nursery, which broke just about every rule in the book. It took the Council at least 8 years to evict him, or possibly just to wait for him to hang up his tools and retire. On 6th June (always my lucky day) Council workers with strimmers came and took away the worst of the undergrowth (the trees, apparently, were all long gone). Two days later we got the phonecall: the Plot was ours, free for the first year if we were up for all the work involved. We had been on the list for over 2 years: we signed up pronto. It even has a shed.

The first time I looked inside, it was festooned with cobwebs. No-one (at least, no-one with fewer than 6 legs) must have been in there for years. There were three old doors leaned up against one of the walls, and a pile of dust which, on being sneezed at, revealed some paint-tins, a bicycle-chain, a pair of scholls (sadly not my size) and, bizarrely, the mouthpiece of a recorder.

A few days later I returned, armed with a broom. I was met with exactly the same interior design (including the small but sturdy spade I had left there), but with one very unsubtle addition: in the middle of the floor was an empty Rizla-packet torn, shall we say, in that characteristic way. It appeared the shed (along with, so the owners tell me, most of the other sheds nearby) had a bit of a social life of an evening.

I set to clearing away all the cobwebs and dust (and the Rizla packet). I found there was a window (it doesn't let much light in though, being just a foot from the high wall of the garden next door), and cleaned and opened it. By the end of the day it was looking quite presentable in there. As I have continued work on the rest of the Plot, a few things have gradually been moved there: a rake, a pair of gardening gloves I found in the street (which are excellent, and a perfect fit), a carpet-square, a bucket and, in case Nature calls, a loo-roll which I tied through its centre to a beam.

So today, after some heavy rain which eases the work, I returned to the Plot to dig out some bindweed. In the shed, everything was exactly as I'd left it...except that the loo-roll was missing. Including the centre, which must have meant someone cutting or untying the string. Leaning out of the window I could see the said centre on the ground, and the sheets too, looking as if they had been useful for something before being defenestrated. But what?? Who had been crying? Or sneezing? Or getting dirty?

If only sheds could talk.

Stop thief

I don't have the world's best memory for faces, but today I was the first to spot him: yes, the Erudite Space has its very own shoplifter. He slopes in, shambles around the shop, and puts small books in the ample pockets of his tatty, unappetising mac. He's particularly fond of Observer books and anything about transport. Let's call him Oswald.

Every bookshop in town has banned him from their premises, but I don't know how that works: I wonder if their own Security Guards, or the Police, march him bodily out into the street, and then I wonder how they stop him from just wandering back in again. I don't think he's ever been arrested. We don't have him banned for some reason, perhaps because we're a charity and we're just supposed to be kind and put up with that sort of thing. So someone has to follow him round the shop, firmly but gently taking books from him and putting them back on the shelves, and answering a string of questions, each one of which makes sense by itself, but which have no logical sequence, are often repeated, and don't really constitute a conversation.

I'm not sure he even knows where he is most of the time. I'd always wondered how long he had been like that, and what horrible trauma in his life had started it all.

A chap I'd earlier directed to the Computing section overheard me warn the Boss of Oswald's presence. And, incredibly, then said right out that as a ten-year-old train enthusiast he had often seen Oswald, then in his twenties but still trainspotting. It was apparent he couldn't fully look after himself even then: perhaps he'd lacked the sense of what other people are, ever since birth. The classmates had assumed he was the sort of person their mums had in mind when they told them never to talk to Strange Men.

All of which means that for the best part of half a century a succession of people have had to provide shelter, food, protection from arrest and accident, and protection of others from inadvertant harm, from Oswald's blithe irresponsibility. In all this time no-one has had the courage or the wherewithal to sieze the initiative and change matters for the better.

Which puts Oswald in unlikely company: the latest campaign by the charity who run our shop is highlighting the effect on the poorest people of a system that has provided shelter, resources and legal protection for large financial institutions, while struggling, and now failing, to protect others from being harmed by their actions.

Sometimes I think that it's time we should all stop just quietly putting the books back on the shelves, and start making arrests.