Library Ireland Week

Tomorrow, I am doing my first Poetry/Song Performance of 2009 as part of the Library Ireland Week, and I am looking forward to it immensely. The Performance will be too Children in Malahide Library.

I love visiting the Library and I think it is a wonderful to have a week set aside to acknowledge the wonderful service Libraries provide, but… My first memory with a Library is an unpleasant one… I shall proceed to explain why…

At a young age I was given a position of responsibility that I was obviously not ready for. We lived in a town in Hertfordshire called, Bishops Stortford and to two different tasks had to be attended to, one involved going to the Bishops Stortford Library to return books and this is the task I was given… My Mother asked me to return books to the Library and to meet her outside after she had performed the other task.

Now I was unaware of the etiquette of returning Library books by giving them to a Librarian, obviously I had been to the Library before this, but obviously had never returned books. So I carried these books into the Library and put them on the shelf… Obviously wanting to do the job properly I had to look around the Library to find similar books so they could go in their rightful place, but I remember the ordeal of locating these ‘rightful places’ being quite tormenting and eventually I placed these books anywhere I could.

As I left the Library, my Mother was cross at the length of time it had taken me to return books and we travelled home in silence…

A while later reminders and fines started coming to our house for the books that I was supposed to have returned… My parents were shocked, ‘these books had been returned.’ They reasoned and I could confirm this…

As time went by I learnt how to return books properly and I never owned up to how I had returned the books that first time I ever did it…

But hopefully, my journey to Malahide Library tomorrow will not be as disagreeable as this memory, but this reading is coming after a weekend of unhappy, for me, sporting results…

I will be unable to hide the fact that I am English, and some of the Children may mention the fact that Ireland beat England in the Rugby, but I’m more concerned with the Manchester United Fans amongst them mentioning and taking pleasure in, the fact that their team beat my team, Tottenham Hotspur, in the Final of the Carling Cup today… some of my songs and poems performed mention Tottenham and I let them all know that I am a Tottenham fan, but I’m sure I’ll be able to deal with any gloating coming my way…

To commemorate Library Ireland Week, I wrote a new song called ‘Library Card Blues’, and it can be listened too at my musical myspace page… www.myspace.com/failedrockstar/ I shall be writing another blog about this tomorrow…