Anyone for books?

People (those mythical “people” you always hear about, who know everything about your life, but who you never meet) say that you rarely really feel older than about sixteen inside yourself, whatever your exterior might say about you. You get older and older with more and more responsibility and wrinkles yet the interior person remains a callow teenager.

This can be quite comforting, depending on how arrogant a person you are. Think of the logic of the situation: you know that inside yourself you are a sixteen year old; other people tell you differently; they cannot see the essential youthfulness of your soul and anyway, what the hell do they know? You can kid yourself along like this for a quite substantial period of time unless you come up against one of the TTMs that define your age. TTM are True Time Moments; those time specific incidents which clearly indicate your real age, and place your firmly in your own era.

For example, going to a supermarket and buying just a single apple. Nothing extraordinary in that, (though I could ask when was the last time that you went to a supermarket and bought a single piece of fruit, but let it pass, let it pass) but the TTM comes when you realise just how much you have paid for it (the singular piece of fruit) and then you translate the amount that you’ve paid in pounds and pence in to £sd. And you suddenly have a dark night of the soul when you realise the present day value of money!

Everyone has a different TTM: for some people it occurs when they visit the homes of younger friends with children and they see how the present generation is being brought up; for others it’s the pocket money their progeny demand; others go to church and find that they cannot sing a single hymn because the ‘traditional’ tunes have been abandoned; others when they attempt to operate a video or DVD recorder and others when they realise that anyone can go to Florida and eat avocados now, not just millionaires. These are all TTM moments, and we should cherish them because they define who we are, or at least they keep trying to tell us who we are and where (in temporal terms) we belong!

I had a True Time Moment in Rumney Library.

I was doing something quite innocuous: renewing my library books. I called into the library with the books before I picked up Toni from work. I brought them into the library and was greeted with gentle pity by the librarian who explained that I didn’t really need to bring the books in to renew them; I could just call in or phone; anything, in fact to make it easier for me. And that is the TTM for me.

I grew up in Cathays with my local library (opposite my primary school) built with money from Dale Carnegie. The library was built as a fairly imposing building, symmetrical and church-like with high windows, dressed stone with solid brick. It was a temple to books and the sacred extended to the self imposed silence which graced the interior. The ceilings were more akin to ecclesiastical roofs than those in public utilities and there was even a decorative spire (as I recall.) So my attitude towards books was formed by constant attendance at the Church of the Holy Text or Cathays Public Library. To me the librarians seemed to be custodians of the books more akin to priests than paid public servants. Books were there to be enjoyed but with the right attitude of respect and humility.

So, brought up with these attitudes to the supply of books, the attitude of the librarian in Rumney was something incongruous: today the customer is the person to be considered and present day life style is the determinant for the way that the library works; the supplicatory attitude of my youth towards the library supply of books is finally a thing of the past, hence my TTM – because it just doesn’t seem right.

But I can learn to live with it