I met the old archivist again today. I was eating a baked potato with cheese and salad, great value at £2, in the Community Centre Cafe. He came and sat across the table from me. I had been reading the ‘Glasgow Evening News’. Some citizen of Linwood had made a plea to the Council to pull down the entire town centre on the grounds that it was an execrescence only matched by parts of Guatemala City and the worst of Ceaucescu’s Romania. I thought the female complainant was a little over the top until I saw a photograph of Linwood Town Centre. It amazes me to think that a country so beautiful in its natural state should produce a town like that. In the motor-car world, if Edinburgh is a Bentley Arnage, Linwood is a Wartburg Knight.
The archivist gathered up knife and fork, and started to devour his ham salad.
“Busy day?” he asked.
“Yes, I replied. “I had a printer print and bind seven Tenders for me. There was so much paper, and they were so heavy, I had to bring them up to the office on a trolley.”
“Can’t you just skim-read them?” he enquired.
“I think the best approach would be just to weigh them – the heavier the Tender, the higher the mark.”
He laughed, a silent, silvery laugh. I looked at him keenly. He was about seventy years ols, but had a full head of soft white hair. He was small, and slim, and his hands had never seen manual work. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He had the appearance of an emeritus professor of philosophy with a touch of lay preacher thrown in for good measure. A ray of sun penetrated the dirty windows of the cafe and settled on the back of his head. It gave him a spiritual, almost mystical aspect. It was difficult not to like and trust this old chap. He answered a question I had no intention of asking him.
“I like working here,” he said.
“But you’re not being paid,” I said. “How can you like that?”
He spread his hands and looked at me from behind his spectacles. His eyes were a weak and watery blue.
“It gives my life a sense of structure, of balance. I was drifting, meandering. I no longer had a sense of purpose. I thought volunteering might change that. It has.”
“I can sympathise with that,” I replied. “When I first retired I had no idea what to do. Thankfully, I’ve never stopped doing paid work since.”
The Archivist nodded. “There are perks”, he said, reflectively.
“Such as?”
“I get my lunch for free,” he replied.
“That must be worth all of £2.50.”
“I have my bus pass too, so I travel here for nothing.”
“That’s another £3.60. Divide that by six hours and you get the equivalent of what a Chinese peasant earns for knocking out running shoes.”
“There’s more to life than money,” he said.
“Yes, of course, I’d forgotten that”. He didn't seem to notice my sarcasm.
There was a moment's silence as he chewed thoughtfully on his slice of ham, though I’d eaten the ham yesterday and it had tasted suspiciously like luncheon meat or even spam. Maybe he was trying to decipher which meat it was by its taste.
“How are you getting on with your archiving?” I eventually asked him, for want of something better to say.
“It’s a slow process”, he said, “I’m not finished the ‘A’s’ yet.”
“How far do you have to go back?”
“Fourteen years”.
I was incredulous. “Fourteen years to keep records of what goes on around this dump?”
“There’s some important documents – minutes of meetings, financial accounts, deeds and the like.”
“Why don’t they buy a scanner and scan them?” I asked.
He was nonplussed.
I went on. “There are scanners now that can scan dozens of pages a minute – they’d be through your records in no time.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “Besides, some of the records are a little damp. I don’t think that they’d go through any scanner.”
“Damp?”
He spread his hands again, almost apologetically this time. “The roof leaks”.
I chortled to myself. No, an electronic scanner certainly wouldn’t be compatible with a dilapidated and decaying community centre whose records were as damp as its rooms.
There was another silence, which the old Archivist eventually broke.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said just now”
“And?”
“It’s just if you got one of those scanner things, there would be no need for me, would there?”
I didn’t have an answer to that.
