A living nightmare happened today

Went to the public library today.
Fantastic things public libraries.
Where else can you just walk in, join and take stuff home for free, stuff that you really want I mean, on a promise that you'll bring it back in three weeks time ?
Just try doing that in Blockbuster or whatever the hell they call themselves now.

So I've got four good books to keep me happy for the next three weeks.
And normally I love browsing around the library.
But this time the library visit was so, well, so .....tacky.

Let me explain...

And before I start, I'm not normally snobby.
But this, I acknowledge right now, is going to sound snobby.
I'm sorry if it offends.

Our local public library is attached to a local high school, which in turn is attached to a sports centre with a swimming pool, which in turn is attached to a very small shopping mall which in turn is attached to a large supermarket of whom Wallmart are the major shareholders. Its a sort of 1970's social city planners dream, you'd put the supermarket, some smaller shops, the school and the public library all in a sort of a precinct arrangement and everything would have a focus, there would be a "centre" to this community that you were building and people would stroll with casual abandon to the supermarket and then maybe they'd go to the library too, or perhaps for a swim, and they'd smile at each other and say "good morning" and there would be trees in the precinct and birdsong and no litter and the folks would whistle "zippedy doo-dah" out their arses they'd be so happy.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

What really happened was that alongside the library and the sports hall and the school and the mall and the supermarket, they also built a whole wedge of council (or social) houses, an "estate" as we like to call them in the UK and usually when you say the words "council estate" you say it with a sneer on your lips because everyone knows that only poor people rent houses in the UK and if you rent instead of buying then you are either too poor to borrow £200,000 to buy a house or you're too stupid to know that your council house rent is just money that you might as well have buried in field somewhere you forgot where, or flushed down the toilet because when you die they just rent the house to another person and you get to leave no assett to your kids.

There I've said it.
Its snobbish I know,
Sorry if it offends.

But hey...

Anyway, back to the story.

So I went to the library and as I parked the car in the Wallmart/Asda car park I noticed that at one end of the car park they had a huge caravan and an equally huge bouncy castle and then some other tents and things, and kids were walking away with balloons and their faces all painted up, and as I walked towards the small precinct or mall I could hear the distinctive sound of The Village People singing "YMCA", which, as I entered the mall I perceived to be coming from a mobile disco that two geeky kids (one of whom was deaf and wearing a hearing aid, the other of whom looked like Plug from The Bash Street Kids) had set up.

The voice inside my head which guides me through the day uttered "what the fuck is going on here" and at about the same time I noticed that inside the mall, down both sides of the mall were lined tables upon which people had spread things and they were trying to sell the shit that they had spread on their tables - and there walking towards me was someone inside a Bob the Builder costume and a little further behind him was someone in some sort of super hero costume that I didn't recognise at all, probably because the person in the super hero costume only weighed seven stone soaking wet and didn't fill out the costume at all.

And as I walked down the mall, thronged by standing people of all shapes and descriptions the voice inside my head kept repeating "what the fuck, look at that, what the fuck is she doing, look, look at that stall, shes selling complete shite, what are you doing here ?"

What indeed I thought, what have they done to this normally quiet shopping mall, why do I have to fight through this moronic crowd to get to the library and where has this moronic crowd come from ?

There was something going on, something organised but for the life of me I couldn't work out what it was, it was like walking through a dream sequence and I had to check to see if I was wearing pyjamas because thats the only thing that was missing from this dream sequence - and the people, where had all of these people come from, there were hundreds of them wheras normally I only see two or three when I go to the library. Hundreds of them, shuffling, poor people from the poor council estate, shuffling, mumbling, poor people, ferreting around on the stalls, not buying anything but just picking up free leaflets from loan companies or coupons for two pence off their next bulk Pot Noodle purchase, I looked out of place, I felt out of place, I was out of place.

Bob the Builder tried to hand me a leaflet from a social housing association, I just stared at him, just stared, and the person inside the Bob the Builder suit must have felt a little uncomfortable with my stare and so they backed away and let me pass through to the open air part of the mall where the public library stands across on the other side - and they'd filled the open space with a huge inflatable car racing track thing inside which four small go-carts were chugging around at less than walking pace, driven by four small children at £1 a go, none of the children were smiling, they all looked miserable as if they'd handed over their £1 a week pocket money expecting to race at 80mph and then found that less than walking pace is all that was available, I stood and watched them for ten seconds and then had to walk around this huge inflatable Silverstone to get into the safe sanctuary of the library.

But it didn't stop there.

Inside the library, blocking my path was a tall, smelly old man. Deeply tanned to an almost impossible mahogany brown so that it must have come out of a bottle of wood stainer, he was dressed in dirty white shorts that were too short to be decent, and a pair of ordinary black shoes on his feet with grey socks on, and was wearing a scruffy, mis-shapen dirty beige tee shirt from whence an incredibly strong smell of BO was issueing forth.

He was tall, six and a half foot tall at least and had a scraggy beard and equally scraggy hair that looked like they had both last seen a barber back in the 1970's and as with all lunatic old men like him he was talking in a voice that was far too loud for public decency and far too opinionated. He wanted to use one of the public computers in the library but couldn't work out what his password was as he'd not used the ones here before but he had used the ones at a different public library and could he still use his old password here ?

The librarian just wanted to get rid of him so she actually gave him her own password to use so that he'd take his opinions and his BO to the far end of the room where the computers were, and as I stepped up to the counter she just looked at me with a gaze that read "see what we have to fuckin put up with all day ?".

I found my four books in record time and within five minutes was gone, fought my way back through the incredible poor peoples table-top-sale-in-a-mall and caught a fleeting glimpse of a police officer sat inside a transit van that was covered in the logo's "Community Policing", he was doing nothing, just sitting there inside his van with the back doors open, sitting on a plastic seat, and by his side was a little police car of the sort that you sit your kids in and put £1 in a slot to make it play a tune and move up and down, except that it was just sitting in his van for him to stare at, he looked very bored.

I almost ran back to my car, it had been a bizarre trip, truly bizarre, and I still do not believe that I witnessed it, I keep checking the clock to see if its just 7am and I've just woken up but no, its 5.30 in the evening and I really did live through a most bizarre morning.