Absence makes the . . . ?

What tells you that you have been absent from your home most poignantly? What item by its very appearance sighs absence when you return? What intimate part of your life decays without your presence?

Soap.

A bar of soap is a strange thing: you ignore it by casual familiarity. Daily use makes it almost invisible, especially when the colour is the hardly assertive white in a white bathroom.

But leave this inoffensive rectangle for a week or more and its transmogrification is bizarre. The smooth, pristine surface becomes filled with crevasses tinged with grime reminding you of those slabs of horror than used to lurk on the washbasins of public loos creating the ultimate oxymoron of dirty soap. Also creating moral disequilibrium in young minds when the parental injunction to ‘wash your hands’ leaves them dirtier than before when using public soap!

A process of melding also occurs when a process not unlike that of stalactite and stalagmite formation takes scraps of soap and creates new and exciting forms. It’s about the only time that you notice soap - when you are trying to get it back into the form that you can ignore again. I’m sure that there is a metaphor for something there, but I’m too cold infested to care.

Talking of caring: I wish to record a peon of praise to Cardiff City Libraries.

I am rereading the novels of Dickens and, having finished ‘Oliver Twist’, the next novel in line is ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. So, returning ‘Oliver’ to my local library and collecting ‘The Devil wears Prada’ (a little treat for myself) I put in an order for ‘Nicholas’ when I returned from taking Toni to work at 9.00 am. By half past three in the afternoon I had been contacted by Rumney Library, when a rather startled sounding librarian told me the book I wanted was ready for collection. Now, that is something that I call service!

I know it sounds a little curmudgeonly but the fact that my local library does not seem to possess the major works of Dickens does seem unpropitious. I suppose that I am still thinking of libraries as a centre for the repository of a central core of culture; and for me that culture means the printed word. I know that libraries are not merely concerned with the printed word. They are internet centres and computer access points; certainly the times that I have been inside my local branch the life of the place seems to be dominated by computer fixated kids with a sedate slow procession of people of the third age taking out their books!

The whole process of computer connection does mean that a book in one location is available to another. The inter library loan system of my youth does seem to be something which is more of a way of life nowadays rather than the exception as it was when I was young. I wonder what system they use to get the books from one location to another: that must be the weak spot in the system and the most expensive one.

‘The Devil Wears Prada’ appeared in the form of a tatty paperback with the word ‘donated’ on the sign out page. I wonder about the economics of that: a paperback has a very limited life in a library, but perhaps a momentary fashionable book-of-the-film book has a limited life anyway and a paperback life could see the whole rush of interest and its death, and then the book could be thrown with little real expense.

I would be fascinated to know a little more about the way that local libraries are run now; what their expectations are; what their mission statement is; what their book buying policy is; how they profile their areas; how they judge success. I may look into this a little more closely now that I am more reliant on their services as my library is currently stored tantalizingly close to me but infuriatingly untouchable in its stacked wooden cases near the steel works!

Now to get acquainted with the fashion super bitch!

Prada rules!