Ssshhhh!
I was in my local library earlier - a man walked up to the counter and said to the librarian "Can I have a pint of lager please?" "I'm sorry," said the librarian, "but this is a library." "Ok," replied the man, "Can I have a pint of lager please?" Of course not - that never happened! But this "joke" may not make any sense at all in the future if libraries carry on the way they're going. For instance, the one in Crouch End has one of those electronic organ type things (I'm not a musical expert, can you tell?), where patrons can sit, headphones on, bashing away at the keys like Geoffrey Rush in a particularly OTT outake from Shine. I can't explain why, but the sound of keys being struck with no music coming out was far more irritating than the sound of actual music would have been. We are still at the stage where libraries are essentially "quiet" places - I remember an incident a few weeks ago where a ...