Libraries gave us power..........

This week we are talking about authority and I am resisting the temptation to write a rant about petty-minded or even sinister aspects of it. Instead I would like to look at a much-maligned institution in our society – the Local Authority.

It is fair to say that local councils attract a reasonable amount of criticism, derision, suspicion and sometimes anger – hardly surprising when you consider the wide range of services for which councils are responsible, that directly and personally affect people’s lives. Given that councils are responsible for services as diverse as parks, housing, planning, sewerage, roads, child protection, transport, sports centres, cremation and burial, schools, street cleaning, libraries, social services, swimming baths, environmental health, to name but a few, there is much potential for things to go wrong. People who are adversely affected by bad decisions, lapses in judgement and other failings are naturally quick to make their feelings known. Whilst headlines will always be made by poor planning decisions, the deaths of abused little children, the paucity of rural bus services etc. I think we often overlook and fail to appreciate the consistent and reliable way in which local services are delivered to us by councils every day of our lives - the civilizing but unglamourous aspects of life that we take absolutely for granted.

I will single out the library service as a case in point. Against a background of central government’s stringent cuts, large scale closures and having to justify their very existence in the face of those who think they are an unnecessary anachronism in a digital world, libraries continue to provide an extraordinary range of opportunities for self-enrichment, and not just in the provision of books.

In recent months I have been lucky enough to attend the following library-sponsored events: a Murder, Mystery and Martinis evening with crime writers Peter Robinson and Ann Cleeves sharing insights into how they go about their craft; a talk by the brilliant Sophie Hannah on her new novel and anything else people wanted to ask her; a book launch event with debut novelist, Emma Healey, now riding high in the book chart (no. 2 for the last few weeks) with ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’; Music and Mince Pies at Moor Park, where my little granddaughter Amelie was playing the violin with her primary school orchestra; taken part in Haunted Tales at Central Library, with the Dead Good Poets; a puppet workshop, in conjunction with Horse and Bamboo’s production of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ at the Grand, at Palatine with my granddaughters. Saturday will see me at the book sale at Central Library – yes, I know I’ve just offloaded a large number of books, in the course of moving house, but I am a hopeless case!

I haven’t even mentioned the reading groups, storytelling sessions, knitting groups, job skills group, literacy and numeracy groups, jigsaw group, meditation and positive thinking group, basic computer skills groups, the bank of PCs, enabling those who do not have access to the internet at home.  And all the others activities that take place in our local libraries. I think the library service enriches our lives and provides cultural and social opportunities for all ages. Oh and did I mention books? You can any request any book and they will procure it for you, at modest cost.

To finish, here is an untitled poem written by Alan Gibbons for the Voices for the Library group, which campaigns against library closures.

I wonder, do we need
Another boarded-up building
In the High Street,
Another plywood or shuttered cataract
Bearing blind, sclerotic witness
To ignorance, wordlessness, decline?
I wonder, do we need
Another abandoned recess
For the tide of crisp packets and Styrofoam trays
To lap and rustle and slap
Against another closed door,
Another back turned
Against the tired, poor, excluded
Yearning to be free?
I wonder, do we need
More rows of empty bookshelves
To make way, one day
For the commodities to define you,
Tell you that if you fill your eyes with purchases
And stuff your ears with products
you can shut out your own humanity?
I wonder, can we still speak and sing,
I wonder, can we turn the page and bring
To all our new generations
A sense that to be human
Is to talk, debate and argue,
Discuss, discover and yearn?
So many questions-
But if they lock this door for good
Who will provide the answers?

By Alan Gibbons

Thank you for reading,
Sheilagh

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More precious than gold

This week we are looking at treasure, which, of course, means different things to different people. I have reached the conclusion that my memories are my greatest treasures, for they contain all the people and occasions that I hold dear in life.

 I’ve always been rubbish at photos. At every photo-worthy occasion I can be relied upon to forget my camera. Even when I’ve remembered to take it with me, I can easily leave it in the car, on the coach or just forget that it’s in my bag. With such a cavalier attitude to preserving noteworthy occasions for posterity, it is no surprise that my photo collection down the years is not a neat pile of albums, all thoughtfully populated with photos carefully annotated and in date order, so that some sense can be made of the decades they commemorate. No, it is an ungainly jumble of assorted packets and loose pictures, all rammed in a cupboard somewhere at my previous home and spilling out whenever the door is opened. This chaos is no doubt symptomatic of a disordered mind!

To me photographs are not the vital treasures that they are to many people. For some it feels almost like the occasion didn’t happen if there is no photographic evidence to prove that it did. I think there’s sometimes a tendency to use all one’s energy in getting the perfect shot and, in so doing, enjoyment of the moment itself can be lost. My treasures rely on memories of happy times, rather than the photographs produced for them. In recent times, I can think of a couple of brilliant occasions, for which the memories mean more to me than the commemorative photos.

My graduation day last year was one of the happiest of my life. I have a professional set of photos of me and my family, posed and somehow static and lifeless, which is rammed in a cupboard etc. It in no way reflects my memories of that day, which are of me and my family, sitting for hours in the glorious sunshine outside the No. 5 café after the ceremony, chatting and downing unseemly numbers of bottles of Prosecco. All around us were my college friends with their families doing the same, all united in pride at our achievement and relief that it was all over, getting gently sozzled in the warmth of a July afternoon.

Another occasion was Blackpool FC’s highly memorable promotion to the premier league. I have the programme to remind me, copies of all the press clippings of the event, the commemorative issues of newspapers, the match ticket stubs. None of them are necessary to enable me to conjure up at will the memories of a glorious sunny day, when the world turned tangerine; every service station on the long journey to Wembley thronged by singing, happy Blackpool supporters and neutrals wishing us well; milling around the ground in apprehensive anticipation and bumping into every Blackpool fan you’ve ever known; the breathtaking first sight of our end inside the ground, a sea of tangerine semi-hysteria; the noise and the heat of the remorseless sun; the match, the growing incredulity that we were going to win; the final whistle, the disbelief; the surprisingly muted atmosphere as we all trouped out of the stadium; the daunting realisation that we would actually have to play in the premier league!

Memories – more precious than gold, rammed in the cupboard of my mind. Hope they never spill out.

To finish, here are a couple of quotations about treasures that I enjoyed reading.

“Nothing in the tangible word that isn't living has any value beyond a dollar amount. Considering that dollars can only buy more tangible and inanimate objects, it would seem a far more worthwhile goal to instead learn to place value on the treasures of the mind. Memories, knowledge and skill together are the only things we will ever actually own.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”
― Oscar Wilde

Thank you for reading,

Sheilagh

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Face looking a bit old? Easy, just airbrush it!

In an idle moment last night, I was leafing through a well-known beauty products brochure and marvelling at the manipulative language employed in its sales pitch, particularly about skin care products.. How do they get away with it? Promises of ‘a more youthful looking you’, ‘youthful looking lips’ and an assurance of ‘a radiant youthful glow’ vied with even more extravagant claims that a skin cream set are ‘anti-ageing heroes’. Another offered an assurance of ‘minimising the visible signs of ageing’. How these marketing merchants love the binary of youth and ageing – and there’s no doubt which is preferable and which is to be  avoided at all costs – and, of course,  the empty promises cost a lot to the hapless consumer. Often too, the pitch is dressed up in pseudo-scientific language, in an attempt to confer respectability on their preposterous claims. 

Then I noticed that one product offered an ‘airbrushed effect’ and another ‘airbrushed looking skin’. Hang on, isn’t airbrushing the ultimate in image manipulation, one that everyone knows presents a distorted, dishonest and unrealistic view of the subject? So now we’re expected to photoshop our faces before we go out in the morning, lest anyone catches us AGEING! And the airbrushed unreality is peddled as attainable – if you’ll just buy our products.   A new low in cynicism on the part of these purveyors of the impossible dream to halt and even reverse the ageing process.

The great shame of these ruthless pushers of illusion and inevitable disappointment is that they are ensnaring younger and younger women into believing themselves inadequate, as they chase impossible rainbows and fail to stem the progress of time. The greatest shame is that there is no shame in the ‘beauty’ industry.

I’ll finish, not with a poem, but a song lyric written by Jarvis Cocker, about ageing – a reminder that we’re all heading that way.  

   

Help the Aged

Help the aged,
one time they were just like you,
drinking,

smoking cigs

and sniffing glue.

Help the aged,
don't just put them in a home,
can't have much fun when they're all on their own.
Give a hand, if you can,
try and help them to unwind.
Give them hope and give them comfort
'cos they're running out of time.

In the meantime we try -
try to forget that nothing lasts forever.
No big deal so give us all a feel.
Funny how it all falls away.
When did you first realise it's time you took an older lover baby?
Teach you stuff although he's looking rough.
Funny how it all falls away.

Help the aged
'cos one day you'll be older too.
You might need someone who can pull you through
and if you look very hard behind those lines upon their face
you may see where you are headed
and it's such a lonely place.

In the meantime we try -
try to forget that nothing lasts forever.
No big deal, so give us all a feel.
Funny how it all falls away.
When did you first realise it's time you took an older lover baby?
Teach you stuff, although he's looking rough.
Funny how it all falls away.

You can dye your hair but it's the one thing you can't change:
can't run away from yourself.

In the meantime we try.
Try to forget that nothing lasts forever.
No big deal, so give us all a feel.
Funny how it all falls away.
When did you first realise it's time you took an older lover baby?
Teach you stuff although he's looking rough.
Funny how it all falls away.
Funny how it all falls away.
So help the aged…….

By Jarvis Cocker

Thank you for reading,

Sheilagh

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Back to the future - that's one direction

Back to the future – that’s one direction

Yesterday’s shock announcement that a ‘sequel’, written by Harper Lee before she wrote the phenomenon that is ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ will be published in July, soon had the trolls and begrudgers in twitter overdrive. It was said, variously, that Ms Lee, at 88, is senile and incapable of making a decision on publication; that she is profoundly deaf and unable to follow what is going on around her; that there exists documentary proof that Ms Lee never wrote another novel and we should be sceptical about any sequel’s authenticity; that an unscrupulous publisher has taken advantage of the fact that Ms Lee’s protector over many decades, her beloved sister, Alice, died last November. Etc., etc., etc. And this all within a few hours of the announcement of the publication of ‘Go Set a Watchman’.

The official version of events is that Ms Lee wrote ‘Go Set a Watchman’, which follows the life of the adult Scout Finch, first. Her editor at the time advised her to write instead a novel from the perspective of Scout as a child. This was duly produced and published, to great and unwavering acclaim, as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The manuscript of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ was subsequently lost and has only now been found all these years later at a lawyer’s office, attached to an early typescript of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Ms Lee herself is said to have approved its publication, believing that it is ‘a pretty decent effort’.

I do not know the truth of the matter. All I know is that I will be beating a path to the nearest bookseller in July.  

From the sublime to the ridiculous - here is my own attempt at a short sequel, this time to Kathryn Stockett’s novel, ‘The Help’, which is set in 1960s Mississippi. It tells the ongoing story of the central character, Skeeter, after she moves to New York. I confirm that it is my own work, I am of relatively sound mind, have all my own teeth and have the mental capacity to sanction its publication!

Skeeter in New York

The beauty of moving to New York City from Jackson, Mississippi is that there is more between them than the 1,200 miles that divides them. They are two different ends of the universe. The contrast between the small-town introversion of Miss Myrna’s column in the Jackson Journal ,or the Junior League of Jackson Newsletter and say, Norman Mailer’s latest irreverent take on American life in Harpers Magazine. The world between Miss LaVole’s husband-snaring styles in Jackson and the stylish, modish fashion of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Saks, Barneys and all the others in New York. The gulf between my parents’ sprawling farmhouse, claustrophobic in its familiarity and intrusion and my tiny second floor apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone on E34th Street, New York City, where there is no-one to question my every movement and thought. I’m sorry, Mother, but that’s what you did and would do still if I had not made the break. The difference between the small town, inward-looking mentality of Jackson and the cosmopolitan, easy impersonality of big city life.

In Jackson latterly I had no life to speak of at all. None of my friends was speaking to me. Stuart had left me in disgust and perplexity at my being someone he didn’t know at all. I had burned all my boats in the aftermath of the publishing of Help, a book I wrote in secret collaboration with Aibileen, Minny and a number of other coloured maids who fair blew the lid off life taking care of white families and  who are good enough to bring up their children but not to use their bathrooms.

In New York City, no-one knows of this. I have my own apartment containing all my important things. I have a desk that houses my typewriter. I have a bookcase of my own, where reposes in pride of place a box wrapped in white paper, tied with light blue ribbon. The box contains a copy of Help, the one signed by over five hundred Church members and sent over by Reverend Johnson. This is more precious to me than anything else I own and I will never be parted from it.

I have a job – a real job – at Harpers Magazine. My office is on Broadway, downtown Manhattan and I take the subway there every morning at 8.15, like a regular New Yorker. My work is as an assistant copy writer, which means that I help edit pieces commissioned or submitted on a chance by aspiring writers and make sure that they are in Harpers housestyle and not defamatory. I am surrounded by writers and writing, which is just the way I like it. Harpers and I are just made for each other!

I phone Mother and Daddy every week, on a Sunday evening. That way, I can feel that I don’t neglect or forget them, but also I can limit Mother’s endless questions about what I’m doing , what men I’m meeting, what I’m eating and wearing to a half an hour, once a week. Daddy is just happy that I’m happy. I phone Aibileen every Saturday morning when I know she won’t be trying to meet her deadline for the Miss Myrna column for the Jackson Journal. She is putting her heart and soul into her weekly column, I know, priding herself on giving the best possible cleaning advice to those who ask for it.

Here in New York, the world feels new and  - well, exciting. I feel close to the developing spirit of questioning the old order and can even make a contribution. I went with Aileen, my boss at Harpers, to a convention of the African-American Civil Rights Movement and was electrified by the speakers calling for what are basic human rights. I feel that we must enact the Civil Rights Bill that President Johnson is trying so hard to force through, to honour the memory of President Kennedy and also for the sake of Aibileen, Minny and all people of colour.

I am also going in August with Aileen and a couple of other people to Shea Stadium to see a new British group called the Beatles, who sound real lively.

‘Go find your life’ Aibeleen had said to me, when I was agonising over whether to take the job at Harpers. I sure am!

Thanks for reading,

Sheilagh

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