Our Nice Library

Last week a group of Leominster residents formally constituted the Friends of Leominster Library. We have a very nice local library that Susan and I use all the time. We’re both serious readers and the library saves us a lot of money. They also rent DVDs for a small fee, which we use from time-to-time.

Last winter there was a notice on the Library counter soliciting interest in a friends group. We signed up for the next meeting and went along to find out that the manager of our library and the guy in charge of libraries for the county were driving the formation of the group. The idea was that we would volunteer our time to help out at library events, promote the use of the library to various community organizations and raise funds to purchase things for use in the library that official funding would not cover. We were told that, in spite news reports that many local government authorities in England were closing libraries due to central government funding cuts, Herefordshire libraries were not currently at risk. Our time and money would not be used to replace paid library staff or offset existing budgets.

After the first meeting the group continued to meet monthly with control of the meetings gradually shifting from the county libraries manager to us as we got to know each other and began to focus on what we wanted to do. In the summer we realized that if we wanted to tap into existing sources of funding, we would have to constitute our group as a quasi-charity with a constitution, officers and a bank account. It took us about three months to agree on the wording of the constitution and we finally passed it last week. And, guess what, I was elected as Chair of the Friends.

We have a Committee that will organize the Friends’ plans and activities. We agreed that the Committee would meet in a couple of weeks to get things started. This was going to be worthwhile and a lot of fun.

The following morning I received an email from somebody I hadn’t heard of at the council with attachments explaining about an on-going project to reorganize “cultural services” in the county with a view to saving some money. They wanted a response from me to a questionnaire about my ideas on stuff like third party operation of the county’s libraries or merger with other services or other counties. This started off a flurry of emails to and from the other Committee members and a lot of Google research.

It turns out that this is not a local initiative at all, but part of a central government program to “rationalize” local cultural services. Herefordshire and Shropshire are working together as one of ten pilot projects in a program controlled by the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Now, our Prime Minister has made a lot of speeches about what he calls the Big Society. One of the principal parts of this Big Society is Localism, which is supposed to be the shifting of decisions away from London and out into local communities. So that’s why it took a lot of digging to find out what was really going on: it was supposed to look like a local initiative instead of a government project.

Maybe this Friends group isn’t going to be quite so much fun after all!

Hooray for Border Collies!

We used to have a border collie called Jesse. The farmer’s collie bitch across the road from us in Warwickshire had a bunch of very cute puppies. For a long time I had not wanted to have a pet and Susan did. Well, one day she went to visit the new puppies and one of them ran over to the fence and started licking her hand. She was immediately smitten and came home to tell me she wanted that puppy. Long story short, I said something like, “Oh, hell, go ahead, but you have to take care of it and clean up after it as well.” Naturally she agreed and a few days later we got a new dog. Susan named him Jesse after Jesse Jackson because, she said, he was black and beatiful.

The first night, locked in the kitchen, the poor thing was frightened and missing his family. We had lined a box with some old blankets for his bed and we tried to get him to sleep in it, but he just cried and cried. I spent most of that night in the kitchen with Jesse stroking him and talking quietly to make him feel safe and loved. Yeah, that’s me: born again dog lover!

Jesse had a pretty good life in Warwickshire, California and Gloucestershire. The worst thing was when we moved back from the States to England and he had to stay in a quarantine kennel for six months. When it was over, we took him home to our little thatched cottage in Gloucestershire worried whether he would be able to make his home. He was fine with the house and garden and took ownership straight away.

When he died at the age of fourteen, the farmer form across the road came over with a spade and helped me bury him in a corner of our garden. It’s a good thing he did because I was bawling so hard I couldn’t have dug the grave by myself; born again dog lover that I had become!

In those days, there was a television series called “One Man and His Dog”. It was a sports program showing sheep dog trials, a competition of shepherds and their collies moving some sheep around a defined course, put them through gates and into a pen. I think we enjoyed the program because of Jesse. Anyway, we sort of missed it when it was finally taken off the air.

Hooray! Thanks to digital satellite TV, the sheep dog trials are back on television. This time it’s the world championships with shepherds and dogs from a lot of different countries.

All the sheep are English.

Car Advertising on TV

Last night there was an interesting car advert on TV: Vauxhall cars, the British brand of General Motors, seems to want to remind us that it is an English car, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. The ad showed England flags and people wearing white English rugby jerseys. My first thought was that the advertisement was intended to differentiate Vauxhall from the German GM brand, Opel, but Susan thought it was just a crude attempt to tie the brand to some idea of patriotism.

England Flag

I wonder if anybody buys a car these days because it’s made in England. There are lots of cars built in Britain these days, but with only a couple of very small specialist builders these plants are owned by foreign companies. Car companies from Japan, China, India, Germany, France and the USA all build cars here.

Maybe that’s what the ad was about.

Which Side Should I Walk On?

OK, driving on the right or left is pretty arbitrary and you just have to accept the local rules wherever you are. But what about walking? Growing up in the States, I came to understand that most of the time people tend to walk on the right, the same as driving. This rule seems to work on sidewalks and supermarket aisles.

Not here! I was, and still am, surprised to find that there is no left-walking rule here. People walk all over the place. When the supermarket has two doors, shoppers go in and out of both doors all the time.

Quality TV Revisited

When I was writing the other day about the perceived relative quality of British and American television, I hadn't seen a brochure titled “Quality First, The BBC’s year 2010-2011” published by the BBC Trust. On the first page the brochure says,

“The BBC Trust is the governing body of the BBC – made up of twelve trustees supported by a team of professional staff. It is our job to get the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers. We do this by supporting and challenging the Executive, those who deliver the BBC’s services, and by making sure all licence fee payers get good value for money.”

A short word about the licence fee is in order: By law, every household in the UK must pay an annual tax if they watch TV of £145.50 called the Licence Fee.

This brochure is mainly devoted to demonstrating the quality of BBC programing. It lists drama, comedy, sports, news, music and children’s programs that are meant to illustrate this quality. Then it goes on to show the results of various surveys done by the BBC itself on different measures of quality. Here’s a sample of the results:

1.       Distinctiveness and quality

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for high quality; Last year 36%, This year 42%.

b.      Average score out of 10 for high quality; Last year 6.4, This year 6.8%.

c.       Per cent who strongly agree BBC television programmes are original and different; Last year 37%, This year 36%.

2.       Approval

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for approval; Last year 38%, This year 42%.

3.       Restore trust in output*

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for “I trust the BBC”; Last year 31%, This year 37%.

b.      Average score out of 10 for I trust the BBC”; Last year 6.0, This year 6.4.

I don’t know about you, but less than 40% for trust and just over 40% for quality doesn’t strike me as particularly worthy of the bragging. If all the people on BBC Radio 4 who think British TV is so much better the its US counterpart are right, then American TV must be a lot worse than I thought.

*Restore trust? I wonder what trust was like before.