Where the bad boys hang.

Several visits to the car doctors saw me hanging around in town. Reading the paper, having a coffee, lunch, shopping, doing what visitors to a market town do. Some people might regard it as killing time. I've found that it is speed which kills and I prefer life in the slow lane, sorry about that Harry!

You know by now, if you have been paying attention, of my fondness for librarians. I could even agree to the idea of the pay scales starting at six figures. OK being congenitally prudent, in a fiscal sense, that would require politicians, generals and captains of industry volunteering their services and a few other adjustments, but what the hell, librarians and libraries are worth it.

A colleague of mine was forced to use the local library to work on her thesis. Space, family and a large amount of paper caused a retreat to the reference section. She found the experience depressing and saddening. I, on the other hand, reveled in the humanity of it all. If you really want to hang with the bad boys and girls, the library is the place.

At one level it looks calm and orderly and even soporific. There are real people quietly muttering to themselves as they keep warm or soothe some inner turmoil. Gentle wives shepherd wild haired old men as they move from fiction, to maps and newspapers searching desperately for their lost memories. I sit in a line of computers checking email watching the electronic intercourse of the terminally dispossessed. People draw facts, like dust into a vacuum cleaner, from towers of reference books, processing them, methodically, one by one. Frantic fingers scuttle across the pink pages of the FT absorbing share prices. Perhaps they have evolved the ability to do this through their finger tips. Laptop users, obviously training for the 2012 speed typing Olympics, hammer away with the gleam of gold and glory in their mind's eye.

It's warm, it's comfortable, it's civilised and the librarians provide a haven of peace and access to information and communality, a respite from this world of violence and terror.

I suppose seven figures would be extravagant!