It is evening. The sun streams in through the dusty windows of the wonderful Mitchell Library. I am seated at the bank of computers that monopolises the centre of the huge auditorium. A woman next to me coughs uncontrollably, placing her scarf over her mouth to stop the germs from spreading. I thought I was a member of Glasgow libraries. I was not.
'Your details have been deleted', the shrewish librarian said to me, brusquely.
'You haven't been here for quite some while.'
'I'm sorry about that,' I said. 'Work dried up.' Grudgingly, she demanded to see proof of my identity. She was not the first person to goggle at my delapidated pink paper driving licence which, if it was ever unfolded, would simply cascade down in a million pieces of confetti. After some minutes and some fevered tapoping on a keyboard, she handed me a blue plastic card.
'Print your name on the back and sign in the space below,' she commanded. I did so.
'Library number and PIN are on the back of the card. Just pick a vacant computer.'
'Thanks for the very smooth service' I replied, with only the slightest hint of irony.
I'm working in Glasgow, and spending my nights in the old Devoncove Hotel, where I stayed off and on for a year between 2011 and 2012. It has been upgraded - there is now a piece of drugget on the back stair. Some things haven't changed. There were no towels in my room, the batteries for the TV remote control didn't work, and when I pulled open the top drawer of my vanitory unit, the drawer front came off in my hand. I had to ring reception three minutes after I had laid down my coffin-sized suitcase. It only took the porter an hour and a half to arrive and make good.
I came down to breakfast this morning to find that the protocol there had changed too. Instead of a plethora of breakfast foods, including ham, spam, several varieties of fruit and a number of types of cheese, the management had adopted the Stalinist principle of variety reduction, so there was muesli or corn flakes and that was it. When I walked up to the counter for my cooked breakfast, the Eastern European girl, whom I knew from the last time, said, apologetically: "Eet eez self sairvice now."
Instead of hash browns, black pudding, scrambled egg and all the other goodies that cause arteries to fur up like the inside of a kettle, we had fried eggs that looked like they had been bought in a joke shop, sausages constructed mainly of gristle and a fair sprinkling of horse, and bacon that was so salty, I thought it had come from the galley of the HMS Endeavour. Because the grub had been lying in tin trays for hours, it was only marginally warm. The effect of the breakfast was as if I had consumed a face flannel thathad been left to soak overnight in the North Sea. To think, I have 158 more days of this before I can be released. Of the job, the less said the better, though it is early doors and it will take time to assimilate and find my way around. Perhaps in a fortnight I will be able to report whether it will bring me joy and happiness, though I suspect that, at the bottom of my heart, it will not.
'Your details have been deleted', the shrewish librarian said to me, brusquely.
'You haven't been here for quite some while.'
'I'm sorry about that,' I said. 'Work dried up.' Grudgingly, she demanded to see proof of my identity. She was not the first person to goggle at my delapidated pink paper driving licence which, if it was ever unfolded, would simply cascade down in a million pieces of confetti. After some minutes and some fevered tapoping on a keyboard, she handed me a blue plastic card.
'Print your name on the back and sign in the space below,' she commanded. I did so.
'Library number and PIN are on the back of the card. Just pick a vacant computer.'
'Thanks for the very smooth service' I replied, with only the slightest hint of irony.
I'm working in Glasgow, and spending my nights in the old Devoncove Hotel, where I stayed off and on for a year between 2011 and 2012. It has been upgraded - there is now a piece of drugget on the back stair. Some things haven't changed. There were no towels in my room, the batteries for the TV remote control didn't work, and when I pulled open the top drawer of my vanitory unit, the drawer front came off in my hand. I had to ring reception three minutes after I had laid down my coffin-sized suitcase. It only took the porter an hour and a half to arrive and make good.
I came down to breakfast this morning to find that the protocol there had changed too. Instead of a plethora of breakfast foods, including ham, spam, several varieties of fruit and a number of types of cheese, the management had adopted the Stalinist principle of variety reduction, so there was muesli or corn flakes and that was it. When I walked up to the counter for my cooked breakfast, the Eastern European girl, whom I knew from the last time, said, apologetically: "Eet eez self sairvice now."
Instead of hash browns, black pudding, scrambled egg and all the other goodies that cause arteries to fur up like the inside of a kettle, we had fried eggs that looked like they had been bought in a joke shop, sausages constructed mainly of gristle and a fair sprinkling of horse, and bacon that was so salty, I thought it had come from the galley of the HMS Endeavour. Because the grub had been lying in tin trays for hours, it was only marginally warm. The effect of the breakfast was as if I had consumed a face flannel thathad been left to soak overnight in the North Sea. To think, I have 158 more days of this before I can be released. Of the job, the less said the better, though it is early doors and it will take time to assimilate and find my way around. Perhaps in a fortnight I will be able to report whether it will bring me joy and happiness, though I suspect that, at the bottom of my heart, it will not.
