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Why We Need Libraries It is the mid-sixties, and it does not matter which year exactly; it may have been the year Mrs White threw water on the cat. It may not. At the bottom of the hill, opposite the football factory which will close in 1981 (although nobody knows this because nobody can look into the future in fact the future is a pair of stout walking boots in a sealed box) they are loading books from the old library to take to the new library which is near the new clinic and not far from the new old folks’ home at the top of the hill. Yes, isn’t it symbolic that these new things are at the top of the hill. Yes, isn’t that Ian McMillan and his pal Chris Allatt waiting outside the empty new library, the green tickets in their fists, their eyes hungry for Biggies? It is the mid-sixties, and the future is waiting to walk away from us, briskly, as though we smell funny, leaving the new 4 To Fold the Evening Star
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library to darken and crack into the old library, closed on Saturday afternoons Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide except on Saturday afternoons and sometimes all day Mondays and sometimes certain days for the need of money to pay the people who open the doors to let the books out. You never know what will happen, though, because the future is a book in a private library. Unless we can request that book and borrow it and read it and read it. Pit Closure as Art In the centre of the major retrospective there is a door which you open. As you open it certain nerves in the face are jangled artificially: you smile. The smile becomes the property of The Artist. Dad, the Donkey’s on Fire 5

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Why We Need Libraries

It is the mid-sixties, and it does not matter which year exactly;

it may have been the year Mrs White threw water on the cat. It may not.

At the bottom of the hill, opposite the football factory which will close in 1981 (although nobody knows this because nobody can look into the future in fact the future is a pair of stout walking boots in a sealed box)

they are loading books from the old library to take to the new library which is near the new clinic and not far from the new old folks’ home at the top of the hill. Yes, isn’t it symbolic that these new things are at the top of the hill. Yes, isn’t that Ian McMillan and his pal Chris

Allatt waiting outside the empty new library, the green tickets in their fists, their eyes hungry for Biggies? It is the mid-sixties, and the future is waiting to walk away from us, briskly, as though we smell funny, leaving the new

4 To Fold the Evening Star

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