Forced down your throat

For once, this isn't about the Welsh language, which is the usual context for this expression - as in, "I've got nothing against the Welsh language so long as it is not forced down my throat" (which being interpreted means, roughly, "so long as nobody speaks it in public or makes me see it on signs). I have something more literal in mind here.

Once only during my long stay in hospital did I see an agency nurse load a large spoon with a lot of food (veg, gravy and meat) and try to cram it all into the mouth of an elderly patient who had tried to decline it. Some of my shock must have shown on my face, as the nurse said, "well, what am I supposed to do? She is losing weight!" Two things were bothering me (apart from the fact that I thought it unkind and undignified): if she had done it to me I might very well have choked; and, where did the memory of our school dining hall suddenly spring from? I genuinely can't recall anyone doing this to me there, but perhaps they did and I had suppressed the memory?

Looking back, the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s has quite a lot to answer for in terms of coercion around food. By the time I reached primary school in the mid 1960s food was fairly plentiful (but not always very nice). Rationing had long since finished. This was hard for those who had lived through the war to adjust to, for to them it was a recent event, while to us it was a distant story about a time before we were born. Didn't they love trying to make us all feel guilty, though! "We would have been very grateful for that", "That's a whole week's ration of meat for a family you've got there", and, in a desperate attempt to get more up to date perhaps, "starving children in Africa would be glad of that". Hardly surprising that the whole atmosphere around eating was a minefield. Enjoyment was never expected: just non-stop controlling behaviour and guilt trips. (I don't pretend to understand the issues behind eating disorders, which seemed to burst out in the 1980s, but I can't imagine that all this would have helped).

If we had been genuinely hungry we would, of course, have eaten the food. The area where my school was was not wealthy, and the pupils were from various backgrounds, but most were certainly not going without at home.

The food really was horrible. We were not allowed to bring sandwiches, or go home for lunch, or ask for smaller helpings. There was no choice. We were usually not allowed to leave anything. (One girl in my year had a number of food allergies and was allowed to bring her own food from home. How we envied her! But another girl I knew actually had to leave mainstream education and go to a special boarding school for the same reason, incredibly.) Everyone on a table had to have finished before they were allowed to go, so a child could be made unpopular with the others who were deprived of their time outside if they made a stand.

Many people record similar experiences of school dinners. Here's a brief list of the worst:

Cabbage boiled for a long time (my memory says all morning, but that can't be right, surely? anyway it was tasteless and smelly).
All the vegetables overdone.
Cheap meat full of large stringy veins.
Corned beef hash! Bleurgh
Toxic dark gravy poured over all of it.
Endless tasteless piles of mashed potato with everything.
The puddings!
Sago. Tapioca.
Lumpy pink blancmange. Pink custard.
Lurid thick yellow custard, with lots of skin and lumps, again poured all over everything.
The very worst, something they called caramel pudding, which bore no resemblance to the real thing but was like the blancmange, only greyish brown.

For the record, I liked liver, the fruit puddings, rice pudding, semolina (just about - this came with very sweet rose hip syrup) and some of the stodgier traditional ones, but this was rather dependent on whether I could manage to grab my plate and run before it was swamped with custard.

I didn't come from a family which went on demos and defied authority, but I did actually organise a protest march, with placards, round the playground, and learned that while plenty agreed with me and were willing to join in at first, they would melt away at the appearance of anyone in authority. It was a more authoritarian age.

My finest hour came when we were served the dreaded grey "caramel" pudding twice in one week. Nobody liked it. (We even discovered that the teachers, who got the same food but in a separate room, were also not eating it.) I refused to eat it, the whole table was kept in for the whole lunch hour (thus ensuring that I was the most unpopular child in the school). They were allowed to go when the bell rang for the end of the lunch hour, but I was not, and so began a grand stand-off with dinner ladies who no doubt were due to go home, an echoing empty dining room, and me not budging. Eventually one of them had what she thought was the killer argument : "If you won't eat it you must take it to the headmaster and explain why". "Oh, yes", I said, and off I went with my plate to seek him out. I was obviously impervious to teacher/dinner lady sarcasm and empty threats, as it never occurred to me that she didn't mean it. Everyone was supposed to be terrified of the headmaster, an "old school" teacher from the Valleys who was rumoured still to be using the cane.

Alas, he was listening to a radio programme, and waved me away impatiently without hearing my grievances - but the dinner ladies had at last realised that they weren't going to win this one, and let me go. Around 20 years later my mother bumped into one of them in the town and heard the whole story again, still being talked about - "and we couldn't believe it, she went to the headmaster with her plate!"

So, while memories are one thing and might raise a smile when you're in need of distraction, please, please, don't make me actually relive eating some of this stuff when I am helpless in an institution and no longer have any control of the situation. For some strange reason this kind of food gets described these days as "comforting". It was unpleasant at the time, probably impossible to recreate now anyway, and the surrounding issues of guilt, bullying and control which went with it are anything but "comforting" to remember.

Chronic illness: unexpected extra hazards. 1, Voice recognition

"You can use voice recognition to access your account", they said. "No, that wouldn't work for me", I said, or rather croaked. "Oh, but it's more secure than remembering passwords and access codes and memorable information," they said. Me: "croak, whisper, cough". Them: "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"

One of the most inconvenient aspects of the combination of chronic conditions I have is the unreliability of my voice. After having pneumonia last year I completely lost it for over a month, and that was very difficult. You can't respond to people who are calling to you from a different room, or walking away from you while asking you a question, or not looking at you when you nod or shake your head. Phone calls are not always possible.

My voice has returned, but it isn't great. It is non-existent first thing in the morning, it improves a bit during the day, it is not great in the evening. Sometimes it suddenly returns at full strength and it is then too loud and sounds aggressive. Sometimes what comes out is a weird bark like an angry duck. Because people can't understand me I am constantly being asked to repeat myself, and as talking can make it all worse I am learning not to initiate unnecessary conversations or make light-hearted throwaway remarks that were only mildly amusing in the first place and don't stand up to multiple repetition.

Voice recognition is one of the tech industry's new toys, however, and none of the institutions investing in it seems to want to hear about the downside. I would like to think that, happily, there are not many people living with this annoying and inconvenient condition, in which case I will be in a minority, shut out of accounts (apparently even HMRC are using it), and maybe the whole Internet one day.

Hospital food

Hospital food is, like most things in the NHS, free at the point of service. You will not be presented with an itemised bill at the end of your stay. It is plentiful (usually) and the feat which the staff accomplish with what must be a small budget, getting so many meals delivered throughout a large building, is amazing. Canteen quantities but without a canteen to do it in!

Having spent a long time in two NHS hospitals during 2019 (on 6 different wards altogether), I had plenty of opportunity to try out most of the menu, which runs over a fortnight and starts again (this does begin to pall if many weeks go by). There are variations in how it is presented (whether you get to choose in advance, for instance) even within the same hospital, and some things seem to be more available on some wards than others.

Roughly, what you can expect is breakfast which is not cooked, apart from porridge, except at weekends when there are a couple of cooked options; a supply of tea and coffee throughout the day (sometimes with cake and/or biscuits); full meals at lunchtime and teatime; possibly a later snack or a fruit trolley (depending on the ward!).

I have heard people comment that the food is "like school dinners". All this really tells me is that they are not former pupils of my school, Priory Road County Primary School, the memory of whose tapioca still has the power to make me heave. There is an element of truth in it which I think comes from more general British catering habits, which go back beyond school dinners ca. 1950-1980 to the wartime British Restaurants and perhaps to workplace canteens, now largely gone, but otherwise it is an unfair comparison.

Here's a very quick summary of the things I liked: pork casserole, the vegetables which accompany the many roast dinners (the meat was less appetising - lamb probably the best), omelettes, soup made on the premises, Friday fish and chips, ice cream, a pasta dish, fruit pies and crumbles. The sponge puddings and cakes were also good but about twice the size of anything I would usually eat as a dessert. While I was there they introduced Glamorgan sausage, which was splendid (especially considering that there is not a great choice for vegetarians). Unfortunately none of the staff or other patients seemed to have heard of Glamorgan sausage, so there were some disappointed would-be sausage-eaters. (This is where seeing the menu, with an explanation, would have been useful).

The things I didn't like do, mostly, come back to those school dinner days: ubiquitous mashed potato (which, I know, most people do like, but I think a little goes a long way); sometimes you might get a strange mixture (omelette with gravy, mashed potato and Brussels sprouts, for instance); rather tasteless macaroni cheese; above all, that terrible British habit of drowning the pudding in custard and the meat and veg in gravy. I loathed school custard, but came round to custard eventually. Again, a little is enough for me, and I don't see the point of concealing the pudding so you have to go fishing for it. I never did come round to gravy, which people tip all over your food (not just in hospital) and in my view spoil it all, Asking for "just a little" custard doesn't work, though - you perhaps get it not quite up to the brim of the bowl but still too much. The actual custard and gravy in hospital are vastly superior to anything served at my school, but the memory lingers on.

The debate about funding all this has been raised as another area in which something at present free could be salami-sliced off in an attempt to reduce costs. Elderly people, who grew up before the NHS was born, are often afraid of the potential cost of their hospital stay, and difficult to reassure on the subject. I saw one lady constantly reject food (and be told off about it, as she was losing weight) - and when she had finally understood that there was to be no bill for it, seize the dish with both hands and eat the whole lot very quickly, obviously hungry. If you feel you should be paying for it, there's nothing to stop you making an appropriate quiet donation, surely, without making everyone else afraid by introducing charges.

On the whole, then, a big and grateful thumbs up to NHS hospital food. There are always going to be some things people don't like. The menus are a little old-fashioned (average age of an in-patient is 84, or so a poster on one of the wards told us - that age group certainly seemed quite enthusiastic about the traditional dishes), and occasionally you could see where little corners had been cut (rice pudding and jam on the online example of the menu, but no jam ever in evidence). It is a reasonably healthy balanced diet. All cheerfully served by kind and patient staff. Diolch!

On having a chronic cough (2: the kindness, or not, of strangers)

I have already noted the anxiety which a cough produces among its witnesses. There is the often - well, mostly - unspoken thought that anyone with a cough is infectious and unthinkingly about to share the germs with everybody else. This really stems from lack of knowledge of chronic conditions and some of their unattractive symptoms. Everyone has had a cough at some point, and unless you are among the unlucky ones with one of those horrible (but NOT contagious) diseases your cough progressed through some disgusting stages and then got better. Therefore, you know all there is to be known about coughs.

People's kindness can be nearly as stressful as the hostility. I have lost count of the cough sweets pressed on me and the glasses of water thrust into my hand, "to soothe your throat". It would be in vain to explain that I haven't got a sore throat. Cough = sore throat, doesn't it? So I usually thank people nicely, but then I feel as if I'm under obligation to stop coughing, which can be difficult to do (without going into too much detail, a coughing fit means my airways need to be cleared, a process which is delayed but not improved by stopping to scoff cough sweets). People mean well, I know, but the end result is that I am hesitant to go anywhere.

The other thing I really can't do is talk much, or at all, from the start of a coughing fit until after the, er, "clearing of the airways". Trying to talk makes the effort worse and delays the process. I do understand that people are trying to check whether I am choking, but I am more likely to do so if I start talking at the operative moment, so better to wait with your questions until the moment passes.

Here is a gentle suggestion of what might constitute a list of Top Things Not To Say To A Complete Stranger With A Cough:

-   That's a nasty cough you've got.

-   Have you seen a doctor about that cough?

-   You should take [X] for that cough [or any other unsolicited advice].

-   Have you seen the posters about how if you've had a cough for more than three weeks it means you've got lung cancer? [this one only comes once you've got far enough into the cough discussion to have established that it's not the sort which comes, is cured, and goes away. Anyway, suppose the cougher does have lung cancer? Are you actually prepared for that answer, before you jump in?]

-   You ought to be in bed.

And finally, but most of all, please don't recite this jolly little rhyme, as several people have done to me. It's not that I lack a sense of humour, but - really? Tactless, or what?

-   It's not the coughing that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in.

Food nostalgia (or, the strange things that cross your mind when you are old, ill, or both at once)

When you are ill, or old, or incapacitated in a way that leaves you with time on your hands and a need not to think too hard about the present, your thoughts begin to wander in unexpected directions. Memories suddenly appear unbidden: a surprising number of them are about food, perhaps because you no longer have much control over what you are being given to eat. I have had sudden cravings for things which I only occasionally ate before being ill; I have wanted to try both new things and things from the past which I haven't had for a long time (perhaps there's an element of a food bucket list in this!); I have longed for dishes I used to cook a lot but can no longer do, things which were not available in hospital and are not part of the repertoire of the rest of my family; I now look obsessively at food blogs and recipes and I still keep up my recipe notes in the hope that one day, perhaps, I will be able to do some of it again.

One memory which floated back was of my grandfather, who, becoming seriously ill with a degenerative disease in his 60s, badly wanted the tripe and onions of his childhood again. Bleurgh. (My grandmother couldn't locate any in the small southern English town they had moved to - he might have had a better chance in the various cities they had lived in). I have also read somewhere that, along with working more generally on memories with older people (particularly those with dementia), someone has had the idea of researching what food was popular in their childhood and giving them that.

You can't over-generalise, of course. Some people's memories, not just about food, are not good. Tread carefully! Asking an old lady about her deceased husband might produce a lovely romantic story, or it might draw out of her a tale of broken fingers and how he only saw the baby once and pushed off and was never seen again and left her destitute. As for food, if I am ever in a position where somebody thinks it would make my day to return to the cuisine of the 1960s and 1970s, I think I would like the chance to veto some of it!

On having a chronic cough (1: On the buses)

It is said that many of us have the power to make someone look up or look in our direction by focusing intently on the one whose attention we want to attract. I am quite good at it though I don't claim to have extraordinary powers of telepathy. Perhaps there is a latent instinct in us all which kicks in (how do we explain it otherwise?).

I have had a persistent and unlovely cough for over 8 years. It is an anti-social thing, tiring and unpleasant for me and not very nice for anyone around me. It is the most obvious symptom of one of my chronic conditions. One day, travelling to work on a Cardiff bus, I became aware that someone somewhere on the bus was doing the telepathic stare thing in my direction. Once you become aware of it it startles you into looking up, and in this case it felt full of malice and ill-will. Sure enough, there was a youngish man glaring at me with hatred in his eyes and heart, clutching a scarf across his mouth.

I have got so used to the cough by now that I forget that in the world of normality someone coughing on public transport means one thing and one thing only: an irresponsible person with an infectious condition has deliberately set out to pass it on to everyone else and make them all ill too. Every now and then people on social media shout out (presumably in lieu of actually shouting on their train or bus, or doing the glare thing) that people with coughs should STAY AT HOME and STAY AWAY FROM WORK.

Here, just for a bit of balance, is a list of some of the reasons why people might be coughing but are not a danger to you:

allergies
asthma
bronchiectasis
COPD
cystic fibrosis
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
lung cancer

They might also have a legacy cough from a previous illness such as flu, pneumonia, or a collapsed lung. This list is of course not complete.

You are not going to catch any of these, worriers on social media and the hater on the bus. I understand the anxiety, of course, but the concern of others, especially when it centres however politely on suggesting I should be out of sight and hearing of the rest of society, is quite stressful, and one does wish to delay being housebound, unemployed and socially isolated for as long as possible. A chronic cough is for life.

Get well soon!

I have in the past been as guilty as anyone else of sending people cards with this message without knowing whether it is appropriate or not. Obviously when someone first becomes ill they and their friends and family all hope that this is a temporary state of affairs. You go the doctor, or the hospital, you are treated, the nasty thing goes away and you are back where you were.

Chronic illness doesn't work like that, unfortunately. You are not going back to normal, although you might be one of the lucky ones whose disease has been found early enough for a bit of improvement, or at least for you not to get any worse in the near future, and for it to be managed successfully. That wouldn't have quite the same snappy impact as a greetings card offering, of course - "Don't get any worse" wouldn't get a lot of custom, I suspect.

As time goes on it may be more apparent that it is not the right message. A chronic illness is very often progressive, even with periods of remission and allowing that some of these conditions can keep you in their grip for a long time (years in some cases). After a while, the expectations of friends and family can be a bit oppressive, and the message, however well meant, can imply that it is up to you not to be ill - go on, get well! Behind this lies bafflement at coming to terms with the idea that this might not happen ("nonsense, they wouldn't let you out of hospital if you weren't getting better") and perhaps some confusion over the difference between having an incurable disease and having a terminal diagnosis (not necessarily the same thing - although this might seem a rather moot point).

There is also a bit of finger-pointing at the sick and the disabled in society at large which basically seems to suggest that our fate is entirely in our hands. Gaining weight? You are eating too much fat and sugar and not exercising enough. Losing weight? You are not eating properly/enough. There can be serious medical causes for both weight loss and gain which have nothing to do with diet and exercise, and this constant background noise of blame is unhelpful and can distract from addressing the actual causes, which may not be in our own hands at all. This is, of course, a scary thought for everyone.

A change of direction?

Dedicated followers will have noticed that things have been rather quiet here recently.  I have been preoccupied with health issues ("slowing down" might be a polite way of putting it!) and wondering whether I might turn in the direction of considering those. After all, the blog is called "Too much information", and readers might soon feel that that is what they are getting! So, due warning: this might become a bit more of a patient's blog, but only in a fairly nebulous way, as the intricacies of the rather complicated clinical picture would probably not be that helpful to others. There are some general points to be made about chronic illness which might be relevant to a wider group of people (and I certainly have plenty of time for reflection, after all).
Watch this space...

It's a brand name so you can't translate it (into Welsh)

Brand-name : “a trade or proprietory name” (OED); otherwise “a name which must not under any circumstances be translated into Welsh”.

“It can’t be translated because it is a brand name”: this is the all-too-familiar protest of those who have perhaps had a bright idea but haven’t included the fact that their business or presence is in Wales in their plans before launching the said idea on the public. Cue, questions as to where the Welsh identity of the “brand” is to be found; response, wriggling, occasionally leading to a reversal (which very often turns out to be quite painless, after all), but sometimes determined refusal to consider the Welsh language (more likely if the parent company is not based in Wales and orders, or not-so-bright ideas, have come from elsewhere).

Although I have mainly worked in the public sector I must put my hand up here and confess to a family background in PR and advertising, so although it is at one or even two removes I do know a little bit about what a brand name is supposed to be and some of the principles of successful marketing. The name must be memorable, easy to associate with the product, and fairly simple. Over time a good brand name will become well-known. An unsuccessful name might close doors (such as names which work in one language but not in another, for instance – the reason why we never saw that refreshing drink Pschitt! for sale on this side of La Manche, at least not under that name. “Pour vous, cher ange, Pschitt orange”, its early slogan, would have been a challenge to English marketing in translation …)

I am talking here in terms of business because that essentially is where terms like brand truly belong. A brand is not the same thing as the public image of a public sector operation, although business language, terms and ideology creep in there all the time. It certainly is not the correct term for a room with a functional name in a building. It is also not the correct term for an advertising slogan or campaign. A business is free not to translate its advertising (although it may be losing a trick by not doing so), but a government agency does have to provide Welsh language versions of its public information. Some slogans are easier to translate than others, and in some cases something may be lost or gained in translation (slogans are the product of a creative mind, after all) but there is no reason for not making the attempt. So, Cardiff Council’s brilliant “Tidy Text” can be and is translated into Welsh (but loses the joke in the process), whereas “Gwener y gwario gwirion” is a witty, and alliterative, improvement on “Black Friday”, although perhaps not quite conveying the meaning which businesses want!

Two examples of “brand name” oddity spring to mind at once.

The Royal Mint, formerly in the Tower of London but based in Llantrisant in Wales since 1968, would surely count as most people’s idea of a public body. It recently opened its doors to the public, and you can go there for the Royal Mint Experience, during which you can enjoy the Royal Tea Experience. In Welsh (once you have found the Welsh version of the website) you are invited to enjoy the “profiad y te brenhinol”, but it is part of something translated as “Profiad y Royal Mint” – a strange and distracting hybrid. (The Welsh name has slipped in in a few places, for further confusion). “Profiad y Royal Mint” appears on all the yellow directional road signs.  Next to the name “Royal Mint” a little ® appears, so it seems that this is now considered a “brand name” – yet the Welsh name “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” has existed for years, and is easily found elsewhere both on the Internet and in print. It’s not as if anyone would have to pay for a special creative translation, as the Welsh name is already known and established. If one really has to treat a name as a brand name (I’m not convinced, but so it seems to be), isn’t it possible to have two? It’s not as if anyone else can claim to be either “Y Bathdy Brenhinol” or “The Royal Mint”, after all! (the current penalty for counterfeiting money is 10 years’ imprisonment).

Another recent example, this one from the private sector and apparently unresolvable, involves Marks & Spencer, or M & S, which appears to have undergone a recent rebranding exercise. Out with the green, in with the black and white; out with the full name, too, in lots of places; more contentiously, in with the weird new coinage “foodhall” (one word), which indicates, if I have understood correctly, the smaller, mainly food outlets, which also sell such things as flowers, newspapers and magazines, and a small selection of kitchen and bathroom consumables, but no clothes or household items. This is problematic even without the Welsh question. Clearly the words “food hall”, which are more correct in English, could not be a “brand name” because, well, they are just words – in this case words which have been used for the same concept by other well-known stores for many years. Where there is a larger M & S, that is with the clothes and shoes and so on, the words “food hall” appear on the store guidance signs, and in Wales they are translated as “neuadd fwyd” along with the other names of different departments in the shop. However, it appears that a “foodhall” is not the same as a “food hall”, and that we are being asked to regard “foodhall” as a brand (let’s for the sake of argument think of these shops as M & S with no knickers). When M & S opened its new “foodhall” in Aberystwyth, the council objected to the lack of Welsh, but was told that “foodhall” was an untranslatable brand name. Several people pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere that the large shops do translate the two words. Ah, but the two words are not a brand name, you see. Clear? Well, no, obviously not, since once you get into having to explain the difference between two words (named department in a bigger store) and one word made out of two words run together (the no-knickers shops) you have obviously failed to get the concept across to the customers, and the name isn’t meeting the requirement of being simple and easily understood. It doesn’t work particularly well in English, because you either have to pronounce it as two words (in which case you have moved away from the brand name) or make something up – should it rhyme with Goodall? Should it have an Old Norse slant and become the Fuđhall?

I haven’t managed to come up with a creative solution, so perhaps it’s just as well I didn’t follow other family members into this field, but I can’t believe that there isn’t something which would work better than this, both for clarity, better English, and, of course with a Welsh version too: or, if the idea of a Welsh brand is unacceptable, another clearer name or word which would work for everyone, including in Aberystwyth where the % of people who speak Welsh is higher than those who do not. Many years ago my grandfather actually worked for Marks and Spencer in just this type of work. I wonder what he might have suggested?

Welsh has official status in Wales, which does not affect the status of English but does mean that Welsh should not be treated less favourably. The law is weak in the area of private enterprise, stronger in the case of public bodies (but in these days of semi-privatisation and arms-length agencies, what exactly counts as a public body?)

Private companies have more freedom to ignore the language, but might like to consider how excluding Welsh from their “brand” comes across to their potential Welsh customers. Basically, if you are saying that your “brand name” cannot or must not be in Welsh, you are really saying that you would rather people didn’t speak Welsh, and you perhaps cannot even comprehend that they might be thinking in Welsh.

Yr wylan deg: seagull nursery time

Gull, n.
Etymology: Perhaps < Welsh gŵylan, Cornish guilan = Breton goelann (whence French goëland), Old Irish foilenn (modern Irish faoileann) < Old Celtic *voilenno-; compare Breton goelaff to weep.
- OED


"Yr wylan deg ar lanw, dioer ..."




The poet Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote his famous poem to the seagull in the fourteenth century. It's really not about the seagull, of course, but about the lady to whom the gull is free to fly, whereas he is not. Centuries later, the gull is an all-too-familiar presence in Wales, including in inner Cardiff, and for a few weeks this summer we had the mixed pleasure of finding ourselves living in a seagull nursery, as after an absence of some years a gull pair decided that our street, with its high but unused Edwardian chimney pots, is an ideal place for the rearing of seagull young (it isn't).
The first high pitched cries of the young chick were heard at the beginning of June, and a tiny head could be seen sticking out on the roof of a neighbour's house. So far, so good: however, seagull chicks hatch apparently already able to walk, but unable to fly, and the tiny amount of space among the chimney pots is wholly inadequate for the next stage. Sure enough, very soon the small fluffy one had reached the ground (how? do they just float down somehow?) and was now in someone's back garden, with its parent still settled on the roof, about 30' higher up. In no time at all, it found its way out of the back garden (where it was safe from cars but not from cats) and eventually round to the busy street, where it took up residence, mainly sitting in the gutter, on the pavement, and in the road.
Having had an unsuccessful episode of seagull rearing in the street before, we knew more or less what to expect - but I had certainly forgotten aspects of human behaviour which gulls inspire (even small fluffy brown ones which look more like ducklings). At a rough guess, I would say that the country is divided absolutely and forever on the subject of seagulls, rather like Brexit. 48% of us seem to be able to co-exist with them, whereas the other 52% really hate them. The internet is full of rants about seagulls and suggestions for getting rid of them: firms offer (illegally) to exterminate chicks. The press regularly carries stories about gull-on-human attacks (I won't name names for likely newspapers, but let's just say there seems to be a common thread here: think, fear - whether of groups of "other" people, various, or wild birds or animals. Squirrels come in for quite a bit of negative attention too).
Seagulls are noisy, they make a mess on your laundry, head and car, and they will swoop at you if they perceive you as a threat, but they do not, in fact, usually actually attack you. They don't like small dogs, small children, or men in hard hats. The presence of a chick in the vicinity ups the likelihood of diving, and it seems that many people do not recognise the young for what they are and do not realise that the big white bird is angry because they are going too close to an apparently unrelated brown one. However much you might dislike wildlife in general, and this sort in particular, chicks and birds with young should be left well alone. They are protected by law, and you not liking them isn't a good enough reason for disturbing them. (There's more information about the legal position here). It's not easy to identify the young ones but after observing the adults I think ours are lesser black-backed gulls (so, not particularly endangered, but their numbers are falling).


Gwylaneg = Gullish
Not in the OED! but gulls definitely communicate with each other and have a number of different cries which, living right in the middle of them, we found we were getting to know. There's a quacking, which sometimes seems to be a gentle alert (e.g. from the parent to the chick, if I left the house - just to let him know that someone was coming, but not a full-on warning of danger); the cries with which they maintain contact with each other; the full head-thrown-back shout; the very high-pitched and insistent sound which the chicks make; and the quite different sounds the adults make when there is immediate danger or threat (partly distress and partly intimidation). We soon learned to recognise, and respond to, this one, as it is quite different from usual gull talk.
During the next few weeks we had our sleep disturbed late at night by the terrible cacophony of one of the adult birds as two men who were old enough to know better danced around in the road throwing sticks and stones at it and tried to catch it as it swooped - possibly unaware of the nearby chick, of course, but FFS! (as they say) - quite apart from unnecessary provocation, how about some consideration for people trying to get to sleep? On another evening the same noise turned out to be reaction to a boy of around 13 stalking the chick with a huge stick, also quite late at night. I spent some time talking to him and eventually, reluctantly, he gave up, insisting that "I'm not going to hurt it" (huh? what was the big stick for then?). Seagulls seem to settle down for the night at around 10 p.m., unless people are throwing things at them or threatening their young.
Not everyone hates seagulls, but those who don't can be a bit of a threat too, unintentionally: some people want to take the chicks away and "save" them, but even though one has to agree that a busy urban street is a bad place for a chick, removing it from its parent is not a good idea. (The parents tend to stay up on the rooftops and don't spend very much time down on the ground with the young, but if you are at close quarters with them you will know that the chick has not been abandoned. Feeding often takes place last thing at night or early in the morning). I ended up having a long chat with a nice lady with a lidded bucket who wanted to take the chick to a vet. "He is being attacked by the other seagulls", she said. (No, they are attacking you because you are trying to take their baby away in a bucket ...) Amazingly she accepted my point and the chick stayed put under the watchful eye of the parents.
About two weeks after arriving on the ground, the chick was joined by another, smaller chick. We guessed that they were from the same nest but not the same age. It was at this point that even the hardest anti-gull heart would begin to melt - surely? - because it became obvious that the two liked each other's company and that gull chicks are probably never meant to be on their own on the ground waiting to fledge. The bigger one looked to sentimental humans like a proud older brother showing his younger sibling his new school. They waddled around everywhere together, snuggled up to each other to sleep, and started doing sensible things like spending the night on doorsteps (instead of in the road).

Sadly, the big brother wasn't able to prevent the little one from wandering out under the wheels of a van pulling away from its parking spot a few days later. It was interesting, if distressing, to watch the reaction of the survivor, and its parent whom it summoned: again, while not wishing to be super-anthropomorphic about it and ascribing human emotions to birds of, presumably, very little brain, both birds displayed agitation and then what seemed like grief, bending their heads down so that their beaks were vertical to the ground and staying motionless like that for a short while.The adult flew off, low, but the chick wandered about with its head down for days, going back every now and then to look at the remains and even moving the dead one off the road.
Just a few days later, one morning we saw the chick sitting on a gatepost, having finally got off the ground (earlier attempts were funny to watch - jumping up and down on the spot flapping its wings), and a few days later still he was seen flying low over the road, as if it were the sea. In fact I wondered whether the gulls think of the road as a version of the sea, as the young one also tried several times to settle down right in the middle for the night. It had not yet had the chance to experience landing on water, yet its behaviour around the water put out for it to drink suggested that it wanted to get in. We did not put any food out for it, reckoning that it seemed to be growing without it and, however gross we found the regurgitative process by which the adult transfers food to its young, felt that they probably knew what they were doing.
The silence in the street on the Sunday morning after seeing the chick flying along the road was eerie and unnerving. Early in the morning we had heard a great deal of seagull vocalising, high up above the street rather than close at hand, but could see nothing. There was no sign of any of the group, and for several days it stayed like that (not wholly quiet, in fact: the magpies and crows which had been keeping a low profile soon started to reappear). This time, at least, there was no mangled feathery corpse anywhere to be seen. The absence of seagull noise made me realise how much their sounds had become the background to everything, and also how alert we had been made by them, looking out all the time for dangers, chasing the chick out of the road, and so on. We convinced ourselves that the chick had flown (although I did start to wonder about sparrowhawks, which have been seen in inner Cardiff preying on smaller birds). Nearly a week later, the family returned, parents back on their usual chimneypots and - yes - the fully fledged brown juvenile seagull up there on the roof with them. I felt as proud as if I had taught him to fly myself!
They are still visiting occasionally (especially on bin day) but seem to be spending most of their time elsewhere. The young one's cry is still the insistent high-pitched shriek of the young, and he is a bit clumsy landing on the roof, but he has otherwise mastered his beautiful brown wings and soars above the rooftops. While the adults do come down to the ground the young one hardly ever does. I wish the other little one could have joined him up there, having spotted a few other more complete family groups with young ones sociably sticking together, but at least he made it in spite of all the odds.

The numberplate game (trivia!)

Once upon a time, British registered cars produced hours of harmless fun on long car journeys. Anyone else remember the numberplate game?

As someone who can't read or write on a car or a bus (and that includes scrolling on a screen) without becoming a biohazard, long car journeys as a passenger, or even short trips on slow-moving buses, are tedious for me. I can't remember how we came across it but at some point in my childhood we discovered the numberplate game, which passed the time. British numberplates used to include the whole range of numbers from 1 to 999 and you had to spot them in numerical order (so you were not actually collecting numbers, as such, merely looking out for the next one and moving on: no writing involved!)

The old system was replaced in September 2001, a few months before my son was born, and my first thought was They Have Spoiled The Game! Surely it would soon become impossible to play, as older cars disappeared from the roads. Not only that, a few years later the government introduced a scrappage scheme intended to boost the sales of new cars by encouraging people to part with their old ones. I therefore didn't attempt to play the game with my own child. The new registration scheme doesn't lend itself to any very obvious equivalent, as although it has been in place for over 14 years there is quite a limited range of numbers (so far, only 02-15 and 51-65). The previous sequence with prefixes A-Y ran from 1983 to 2001, and before that there was a sequence with suffixes, from 1963 (ish) to 1982. Earlier than that there were also plates with up to three numbers.

On a longish walk down a busy road a few weeks ago for some reason the game popped into my head, and I noticed that many of the cars passing me had pre-2001 plates. I started wondering whether it would still be possible to play the game after all (surely not? How many people have cars that are over 14 years old? OK, I do, but surely it isn't typical?) I then had a little bet with myself, that if I should happen to see an old car with a number 1 I would start again and see how far I could get. Within ten minutes I had seen 1, 2, 3 and 4, in that order. Do not make bets with yourself.

I don't know that I am really obsessive enough to carry on with this all the way to 999, but observations over the past few weeks have led to some surprises. There really are lots of old cars still on the road. Why? Is it a Cardiff thing? Is it just that the economic recovery hasn't reached Cardiff? Do we have better car mechanics than other places? Is it that people may be in work, so have the money to run a car, but are not affluent enough to borrow money for new cars or to buy them outright? A stroll around my neighbourhood revealed over 100 pre-2001 registered cars, with a surprising number of those coming from the pre-1983 sequence. There are even a few which predate the A-Y suffixes, so these vehicles are over 50 years old. Some of them are the classic makes which clearly really do last, but others are not so obviously so (although it is not a bad guide to which manufacturers are good!) I am certainly not going to feel so self-conscious about my own old car in future. While there are, as you might expect, older cars in down-at-heel areas, you will also find them in some more comfortably-off districts, perhaps because there are elderly drivers there who are not quite ready to stop driving altogether but think it is not worthwhile to invest in a new car. In some streets you will pass a row of cars in which all or nearly all are over 14 years old. There are some exceptions (personalised numberplates, or people who have chosen to keep a favourite number from car to car, so the car is not as old as its registration makes it appear) but even so, it's obvious that many people do not change their car at anything like the rate which car manufacturers might hope for. How do they keep going at all, if Cardiff is typical?

The game is really just a harmless pastime, but it does have the side-effect of making you quite observant. Woe to anyone who commits a crime if their car happens to have a number close to one someone playing the game is looking for (although you might feel a bit silly confessing - "Yes, I'm sure the number was 121, I remember because I've been looking for 120 for days and it was annoying seeing the next one"). As far as I can remember, the rate of spotting numbers is not dissimilar to what it was back in the 1970s. More cars on the roads compensate for the new ones which don't count.

I haven't given up yet - a month-long wait for one number nearly made me forget the whole thing, but yesterday I saw the next two numbers within seconds of each other, so I might carry on for a bit longer, and marvel at what I've discovered about the car market in the meantime.

Words in vogue: returning, again

Another one to look out for. "We are returning [X] to [X]", which being interpreted seems to mean "We have successfully confiscated [X]; "We have changed the ownership of [X] to something which it never was"; "We have altered things to how we would like them to be".

The use of "return", which actually means "give back", is designed to make you feel that justice is somehow being done and  a wrong is being put right. Increasingly it is being used not to indicate this, but to indicate a change in which in fact something is happening for the very first time ever. Please don't be taken in!

Thus, George Osborne (or, at least, his twitter account, probably in the care of a young SPAD):
(Oct 13): "We've finished the process of returning @RoyalMail to private sector". Eh? Since when was the Royal Mail in the private sector in the first place? The clue is in the name: although one might argue that 17th century monarchs experimented with a version of outsourcing before the Commonwealth period, it would be hard to describe the Royal Mail's history in terms of nationalisation at any point (whereas, if he says the same about one of the banks partially nationalised in the wake of the 2008 crash, that would be a legitimate use of the term.)

Or, as enthusiastic "big society" types have said to me, "the libraries are being returned to the community" - which means, exactly, what, other than the removal of public money, resources and responsibility? They are already "in the community" (that's what a local council is, remember?)

Or, to pick a local example, this rather lazy headline from the Western Mail: "It will be very nice to enjoy it as a residential area again" - from which anyone who didn't know the area might imagine that the houses came first and were there for years before the evil council put a tip next door (in fact, the tip used to be three times the size, and it was there before the houses were built: anyone moving there must have already known about the tip). Before the tip, the area was scrubby woodland.

I have the feeling that there will be many more examples of this sneaky rewriting of history. Beware the words "returned" and "again" - at the very least, ask what is the similarity between the modern version of anything and its supposed original state, that's the one it is being "returned" to "again".

This year, next year, some time, never?

This is a cry from the heart from a frustrated librarian. (I don't think there are any easy answers to any of this!)

Dear publishers,

1.  Please don't announce your titles too early. (I'm not really sure how early is too early!)
Some publishers seem to announce titles a very long way ahead of the proposed date of publication. I'm guessing this is in part a way of marking out the territory (look, we have someone working on this subject, so don't you aspiring authors/competing academics start getting ideas about writing about it!) Perhaps sometimes all the intentions are good, but the author just can't quite make the leap from proposal to actual book.

2. If you do announce a title knowing it is far from seeing the light of day, please don't give fictitious dates of publication, and raise false expectations.
Do publishers do this in order to gauge interest? Does the publication of a title perhaps even depend on advance orders?
I do very much hope the latter is not the case, as many libraries these days (both academic and others) are not able to keep orders indefinitely in their systems: the money has to be spent within a given period of time, or it is lost to the library (and, in the case of public libraries, may then cause a reduction in next year's budget - this was the case even in good times! The library would be blamed for not having spent its allowed budget, and this could be used as evidence that it did not need so much). It would be a shame if publishers were using orders to judge the potential interest in a title. In fact, the whole exercise would become pointless: ghost books which do not exist which might be going to exist if enough people buy them, but people trying to buy them can't because they don't (yet) exist, so the people trying to buy them have to find something else to buy instead, and then the books will never exist ...

3. Sometimes, of course, things don't go according to plan. If the author is going to miss a deadline - perhaps more than one - just be realistic! If it's an interesting subject, we still want it - but we really don't want to have to keep checking publication dates, perhaps deleting and reinstating orders, or have to persuade eager readers that the book they have been told was being published in the autumn does not yet exist.

On that subject,
Dear academics,

1. It would be very very nice if you could keep your publication information up to date, and not make it sound as if your latest work is about to appear, when you must know that that is not going to happen very soon.

2. If you want to put the latest title of a fellow academic on a reading list, please make sure it does actually exist in the real world and not only in a future - or possible - one.
There are quite a few "ghost" academic publications out there, some of which are asked for fairly often - but they were only ever a gleam in the author's eye and never saw the light of day. The most difficult to disprove are the ones which somehow seem to have acquired an ISBN somewhere along the way - and not always a valid one! A library of all the books which were announced but never appeared perhaps exists in a parallel universe somewhere, and there are some interesting titles in it, but sadly we have to operate in a real world in which we have to satisfy our customers', and our accountants', expectations.

I'm told that we have recently received details of a proposed publication with a date of 2035, and that this is definitely not a typo. Other than indicating that a project is under way, this is not really very helpful from an administrative point of view!

A little realism from publishers - and academics - and perhaps authors? - would help enormously, and it would in no way affect sales: it would save a lot of wasted effort, and sometimes money, and make for better customer relations all round - unfortunately libraries are sometimes caught in the middle between the reader and the publisher. After all, we all know that deadlines are not cast in stone, especially in publishing!

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by". - Douglas Adams, The salmon of doubt.

Hubs: or, Thoughts of an "anti-hubber"

"Today’s anti-hubbers may come to look as foolish as those 19th-century segregationists and pamphleteers do to us". 

This quotation comes from a thoughtful article from December's Guardian, by Lucy Mangan. She doesn't mean it as a compliment, but I've decided to embrace the word "anti-hubber" (and yes, I do know that using labels such as this is meant to belittle). I consider myself to be a proud anti-hubber: here's why:

I think it's a fad. It isn't a recent one, of course: under another name, I first came across it as one of the ideas of Dame Shirley Porter, who was, oh younger readers, Leader of Westminster City Council, where I both worked and lived in the 1980s. Do feel free to Google her: I won't say anything more about that, other than to point out that that association might just possibly have coloured my opinion, and, again, it isn't a new idea.

I think it's a fad with a purpose: to save (minute amounts of) money, to de-professionalise the staff, to take over the nicer library buildings and subvert them to another purpose, to get rid of those library buildings which are in need of investment. 

I think it is also an umbrella term for many different things. I've been challenged on my obvious reluctance to embrace the brave new world of hubs by one member of the library profession who says that, if library-led, a hub can be a vibrant new thing which can breathe new life into the library service. That would be great (although I have my doubts): but then I haven't seen anything like this in practice. With the right input perhaps the library model can be adapted: but, how often are these proposals library-led? and, what exactly is meant by a hub?

 I have been asked "what is a hub?" many times recently, by people who are puzzled by the term. In Cardiff we have just been through one of those "consultation" processes which included a page and a half of options for changing libraries into hubs, moving library services into different areas and amalgamating with other services, &c. &c.. One person said to me "I want to keep my library, but if a hub is the only option I would rather have that than nothing, but then I don't know what a hub is!" Another, who was a Welsh-speaker, assumed it was connected to the Welsh word "hybu", which means "encourage", or perhaps "inspire". If you read the Guardian article mentioned above it seems to be implying that it means having a cafe on site (the context is the Sieghart report on England's libraries). In Cardiff it seems to mean a building in which any other council functions might also take place, in particular housing or benefits advice. Cardiff has some "hubs" which do not include library services, so you could not assume that a "hub" would always have library services in it. At the moment Cardiff's libraries are in a council portfolio dealing with social issues ("Community, Development, Co-operatives, and Social Enterprise") - at least, I think that's what that means - so the proposed new "hubs" reflect that. They have also in the past been in the education portfolio (at which point it was suggested at least by one person that they should be located in schools) and, more recently, in leisure services (when it was suggested rather more frequently that libraries should be in leisure centres or swimming pools). At one point they were joined with bereavement services, although locating libraries in cemeteries mercifully doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. In some other local authorities they are in "enterprise hubs", which are more like business information centres - which used in fact to be not uncommon in public libraries. Other ideas mooted elsewhere have included library services being run from a variety of buildings which are not part of the relevant council, such as pubs and police stations. 

The trouble to my mind with all of these suggestions is that I do really believe that a library should be - neutral isn't possible, but as neutral as it can be. There are lots of people who really would not want to go into a building shared with a police station or a religious institution. Plenty of people don't like the idea of going into a pub. Others would hesitate to take their children to a building which is also the main point of assistance for ex-offenders looking for help with housing: victims of circumstance the majority may be, but there will be some who are not, and surely I don't need to point out all the potential problems which might arise? It works the other way round too: if you are going to register a death, do you really want to do it in a public library, which is not only public but might be full of children having a merry time just when you least want to be confronted with that? In Kent, you might have to. Closer to home in Cardiff there are serious questions about confidentiality in those buildings which have combined a library service with social help. Where is the confidentiality, if you have a housing problem which might be caused by your domestic situation, and you are expected to broadcast this to your neighbours in the middle of a public library? 

The advantages of co-locating services are clearly mainly to save money, as the state, even at the local level, retreats. Fewer buildings (and staff) mean lower overheads. Perhaps the "hub" concept actually can mean expanding services in some areas (the social services-type hub, not the posh-cafe hub). Around 18 months ago, for instance, Cardiff closed its much-loved branch library in Ely, a relatively deprived area. Ely Library was a lovely purpose-built library, designed by staff and students from the Welsh School of Architecture. (How I wished, when I was the branch librarian at more affluent but less well-provided-for Rhiwbina, that I could have uprooted this delightful building and moved it to north Cardiff!) Library services were moved across the road to "The Hub", and, according to the Minister, it was a great improvement. I have to accept that his statistics are correct, but I find this astonishing. A 60% increase in users? If true, that is splendid, and I eat my words (but can it be?) 

The closed Ely library had no notice on it telling people that there was still a library service in the area - only a brief note to say that there was nothing worth stealing left in the building, or words to that effect. From the road, there is no clue that there is a library service inside The Hub, but at least The Hub does still provide a library service in an area where it is sorely needed (another branch library in the vicinity closed some years ago). Other "hubs" proposed are to take the place of existing libraries which will close, and are not necessarily in the same areas as those libraries.

These examples are all at one end of the spectrum, but the article in the Guardian seems to be envisaging something quite different: a smart coffee shop with books. The idea of income generation has been put forward in Cardiff too. This raises one other awkward thing: the relationship of the public and private sectors. Local small businesses can be very supportive; a public facility such as a library draws customers to the area and there is a certain amount of mutual interdependence. One wonders whether that would survive the library becoming a competitor. This all might depend on the location of the library, of course.

A hub, then, can mean whatever you want it to mean. One essential seems to be that the word "library" must not appear anywhere in its vicinity. (Why? Has it become toxic?) 

Once libraries lose their separate identity (apart perhaps from those which have successfully transformed themselves and remained under the aegis of something that is recognisably still library-controlled) they are at the mercy of the services with which they have been co-located. We have already seen this in a way in Cardiff, with local libraries which were located in small suburban shopping precincts in the 1960s and 1970s for what would have seemed at the time to be forward-looking reasons: taking the libraries to where people were, taking advantage of the footfall of the shopping centres to encourage people into the libraries, and vice versa: but as those same shopping centres declined, the libraries were left stranded and blighted with them. If the whole concept of the "hub" falls out of favour, what happens to the library services then? What happens if there is a political change in the relevant authority, which leads to different priorities? 

It is so easy to criticise doubters as being Luddites, opposed to change, stuck in the past, and so on. It's a very difficult charge to counter. "Change" has been the mantra of the past 30 years. People my age have not only lived through a lot of change, we are even beginning to see some of the same ideas come round again, dressed as new concepts. It would be nice if someone, occasionally, would listen to the voices of experience who already know what hasn't worked before, and why.

Public libraries: victim of local government reorganisation?

The current plight of public libraries in the UK is by now recognised even outside the profession. The last five years have seen an unprecedented attack on them, sparked off or at least given wings by a consultants' report by KPMG in 2010 which claimed that librarians were "over-skilled" and that one way forward was to take public libraries out of local government control and let them be run by volunteers (if at all).

I am not going to rehearse all the arguments and the various attempts across the UK to reduce the public library service here, but one factor which hasn't had much attention strikes me quite forcibly: that this has come about largely as a result of the reforms in local government which took place in the 1990s, in particular the introduction of the cabinet model.

At one time, local councils split their various functions into small, discrete, manageable chunks. Education, clearly, was always a large and important department, as was social services. Other smaller services though also had their own committees, with their own dedicated council member who chaired the committee and a number of other councillors who took an active part. With the introduction of cabinet-style government, the functions were rationalised, no doubt getting rid of some unnecessary bureaucracy in the process. In the case of libraries, though, the old system worked fairly well and in their favour. The library committee was a rather nice committee for a councillor to be on; there was usually a Chief/County/City/Town Librarian with senior status who could develop a relationship with this committee, in particular with its chair. Once that was swept away, the close relationship was lost: there was no obvious portfolio holder who could give libraries so much attention (as they now became part of a much bigger set of services); with that went the loss of status and influence for the senior librarian, and, I would guess, this often led eventually to having fewer senior posts and the downgrading of remaining ones. Ultimately this led to a situation in which there were few influential voices to be heard in support of libraries at a senior level in the council, whether from elected members or from officers.

Cardiff's current difficulties arise partly from this by now historic shift, I believe. I am not singling Cardiff out in particular to suggest that it is any worse than others, only because I know a little of its recent history. The question which was never satisfactorily resolved at Cardiff was, where, in the now limited number of "cabinet portfolios", should libraries be? Other councils have had their own answers to this, and they are not without their problems either. One fairly common solution is to place them with leisure services. In the current climate, this might mean that the whole library service is to be outsourced along with the rest of leisure services (as proposed in Hull, and discussed by Alan Wylie here). Elsewhere, they might be in an education department, which some may think fits the libraries' purpose better, but can be difficult financially (and in terms of getting the relevant councillor's attention, and competing for resources with schools). If the council has a museum or an archive service it might belong with those in a "cultural" portfolio (not an option for Cardiff, whose museum became the National Museum of Wales long ago, and whose archives are part of the historic county's inheritance). Cardiff has in fact been in what seems like a never-ending state of reorganisation ever since coming into existence in 1996, and libraries have been passed round like a hot potato from one place to another. There was a brief pause of a year or so after 1996, and then the "pass-the-parcel" game began, with layers being peeled off each time the music stopped. In the last fifteen years libraries have been in at least five different parts of the structure, starting with education, then leisure, and then various combinations of other things, some of which overlapped while most did not. At the moment the cabinet member responsible for them holds the portfolio for "Community, Development, Co-operatives and Social Enterprise", with an assistant cabinet member for "Young People & Learning (including Libraries)". This all sounds quite woolly and difficult to get a handle on from outside the structure. There has not been a "Chief Librarian", as such, for over ten years: whatever else reorganisation does, it doesn't bring clarity in terms of job titles which can be easily understood by the general public.

Whichever department libraries were moved to, the senior non-library staff seemed to have in common:

1. No previous knowledge of or interest in libraries

2. No idea - often literally not a clue until told - that libraries are a statutory service protected by an Act of Parliament, which states among other things that the basic service has to be provided free of charge (an unwelcome shock to some!)

3. A desire to make libraries be more like whatever else was in the portfolio

4. A desire to make libraries serve the other part of their portfolio to the exclusion of other things (again, something which is incompatible with the Act, which states the local authorities must provide a "comprehensive" service)

5. Co-locating libraries with whatever else was in their portfolio

The combined effect of all of this has been to leave libraries vulnerable to every organisational change, to have no long-term planning (because who knows whose portfolio they might be in next time?), no overall vision for libraries, certainly no succession planning. Overall decisions are made from outside the profession, according to the agenda of other services (but not necessarily the same ones from one year to another). The loss of status of the professional library staff, leaving a very few trying to implement policies which are not library-led, also weakens a service overall. Again, I am not particularly singling Cardiff out: I think the problems are common to many other places.

Libraries have not been served well by the fragmentation of responsibility which has happened due to constant reorganisation, lost in having to compete for attention and resources with bigger and more vocal services (and, in the case of Cardiff, frequent changes of alignment). Small sometimes really is best!

Words in vogue: subsidy

Suddenly the word "subsidy" seems to be very much in fashion, especially in local government. I've heard it three times in the last week used in connection with local government services, but I don't recall hearing it in this context before.

Recently it was in the news - and continues to be to some extent - due to the changes in housing benefit which introduced rules about the number of bedrooms that anyone claiming housing benefit would be entitled to, with a commensurate reduction in their benefit if they were deemed to have too many rooms. Opponents of this change called it the "bedroom tax", which was a clever soundbite and infuriated the government, who (correctly) pointed out that it was not a tax, but who still found it difficult to counter. (It had the unlooked-for and unwanted effect of leading elderly and comfortably-off supporters of the government to think that they were actually going to be taxed on their own extra rooms - rather like King William III's window tax and the subsequent Georgian attempts to increase revenue from the tax by decreasing the number of windows you could have before incurring it). Then somebody came up with the idea of calling it the "spare room subsidy". The implication here is clear: money paid to people with rooms which are now deemed to be surplus to their needs is a hand-out, has always been so, and is to be withdrawn (but it never was called the "spare room subsidy" before: this is an attempt to put a certain spin on the policy).

It's a word with an interesting history. According to the OED (use your public library's subscription to check it online!) it was often originally used to indicate a tax: a tax on imports and exports, which was given to the sovereign; a levy paid by parliament to the sovereign for a particular purpose (such as a war); or (an obsolete meaning) help, assistance (of the kind which you could request from a saint, for instance).

More generally, it also means: a donation (usually to provide assistance); a sum which one country might send to another for a specific purpose (such as war, or to repay aid); and, the meaning which is closest to what we are starting to see now, money granted by the state or a public body to keep down the price of a commodity or service or to support something held to be in the public interest (so, the government's intervention to assist the banks after the crash could reasonably be called a subsidy, as would be money supporting a rural bus service which might otherwise be too expensive to be viable, but which is considered to be in the public interest because it enables people living in otherwise isolated communities to have jobs, visit the shops, &c.)

The word "subsidy" does not traditionally have negative connotations (such as the idea of a generous hand-out to an undeserving recipient, or the idea of its being something which could be withdrawn at any time and for which the recipient should be suitably grateful). It is not a word to use with scorn about something which one does not wish to pay for any more. This seems to be the meaning which is beginning to be attached to it, however. It has come a long way from its meaning of a tax which was raised in order to fund the monarch!

It is not a word which is appropriate when discussing the provision of statutory services. They are not "subsidised" but provided in accordance with legal requirements. We do not need to feel inferior for being on the receiving end of them. Did the monarch ever feel this when receiving his subsidy? or, to be more up to date, do the banks show any sign of unworthiness at having received such a substantial subsidy? Local government spin doctors and eager adopters of buzz words everywhere, please desist! We know what you are trying to do: use language to distort the argument. You have been rumbled!

Words in vogue: reform

"Reform" used to mean a change which was an improvement. The SOED [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary] lists several variations on this, many of them with quite a strong sense that a wrong is being put right, an abuse is being corrected, malpractice is being rectified, &c.

Perhaps "reform" still does have this meaning, and its current apparent frequent misuse is due to the fact that one person's reform is sometimes another's retrograde step. Whatever the reason, it seems to be being used widely in contexts in which opinion is not supposed to be being expressed. The use of the word "reform" implies that whatever change is being discussed is a change for the better (and, therefore, that the speaker supports the change). Something to remember next time you hear a BBC reporter discussing "necessary reforms".

Spelling

I've been thinking about spelling quite a lot recently. I've never had very many problems with spelling, and I think that's largely because I have always read a lot. If you read a lot, the patterns of the words, however illogical the spelling of many English words may be, fix themselves somehow on your retina or in your memory and you can reproduce them without too much difficulty. Spelling in English is incredibly inconsistent, for all sorts of historical reasons, so learning rules probably doesn't get you very far. I remain in awe of people who learn it as a language which is not their first. Welsh is so much easier, despite all the silly jokes beloved of (usually, English, or at least Anglophone) journalists. Learn the rules and with a very few exceptions you can pronounce the words: hear the words and you can, usually, have a stab at spelling them accurately. Not so with English (or should that be Inglish?)

I've been trying to work out which words are likely to cause problems, particularly for anyone who doesn't read widely in English and/or for anyone whose language of education is not English (in order to help my son a little with his English, for one thing). How fortunate we are to have the outpourings of Twitter, comments on newspaper articles and other manifestations online to give us a clue. Here are a few versions of English words and phrases, all of which I have seen online recently:

draw [for furniture]
chester draws [ditto]
I don't give a dam
The damn has burst
To and throw
bi laws
flem
the church bizarre

These are all probably genuine misspellings rather than typos, and suggest a lack of understanding of the meaning of some of the expressions (if you can change "to and fro" to something quite different it suggests that you don't understand where the phrase comes from). They are certainly also the result of hearing, but not seeing, the words. There are plenty more to be seen all the time online.

In the face of all this, I might be wasting my time trying to convince my son that correct spelling matters. After all, he can see examples of mistakes every day, many of them made by adults (and many of those are quite well-educated adults).  Perhaps I am just too fussy! I admit to pedantry - but there is still a point to spelling, even in a language which makes it so difficult for you by the divergence between its orthography and its pronunciation. How many online searches fail because of incorrect spelling, for instance? Google will often give you the accurate alternative, but not everything else does (including many library catalogues and databases).

Thoughts, and examples, welcome!



POSTSCRIPT:
Dr. Bethan Jenkins of Oxford has pointed me in the direction of eggcorns, which I hadn't come across before. It's a database of exactly what I was thinking of, but with citations. I haven't given any citations, largely because my examples are things I have spotted people I know either in real life or online using, and I think anonymity is, in that case, the wisest if not the most reliable course (so I can't back anything up!)

Cataloguers, the scapegoats of the library world

"People think librarians are odd, but even librarians think cataloguers are odd" - or words to that effect, said to me long ago when I (inadvertently) became a cataloguer in a prestigious university library in London. It's certainly true that cataloguers don't seem to have many friends, especially when the cuts bite. They are a discrete bunch, easy to separate from colleagues and perhaps easy to dispense with (this has certainly been the case over the years in public libraries). They tend to work out of sight of the rest of the library service (at Cardiff University cataloguers are in an office block some way away from most of the libraries we serve).

Out of sight doesn't necessarily mean out of mind, but it does mean that cataloguing can be seen as something isolated from the immediate role of the library. Out of sight also means that the quantity of books allegedly sitting on shelves and not reaching the readers can grow to mythical proportions. It's a difficult thing to counter once the belief becomes widespread in the library service. "Oh, it hasn't come yet, it's still in cataloguing" soon becomes "there must be quicker ways of doing this", "couldn't we get a student to do it for work experience?", and variations on the theme. How big does a backlog have to be before it can be said to be having a negative effect on the service and the end-user? Our backlog of current material, that is new books bought for research and teaching, including reading list titles, was about half a shelf at the beginning of this week. At no point during the last six months has it been more than four shelves at the most - it is usually less than that - yet in the minds of those who have not seen it it seems to rival the contents of an actual library.

As for the current material, cataloguers rarely catalogue from scratch: the new textbooks nearly always come with an existing record which simply needs some tidying up to conform to the requirements of the system. We classify them ourselves. Very little cataloguer time is spent on some of this material. The things which do take more time are the more esoteric publications, particularly overseas material, and audio-visual material. (If you don't spend time on these, your lovely new whizzy discovery platform won't work properly.) External companies which offer to provide a cataloguing service tend also to be quicker and stronger on the "bread-and-butter" textbooks, and less able to fulfil requirements when it comes to the more obscure material, as you would expect.

The cataloguer wastefully doing everything from the beginning every time, and duplicating the same work done in other libraries, is another myth which is hard to crack. Cataloguers have shared records for decades - and I do mean a long time (i.e. even before I was born!) - but this fact doesn't seem to be widely known even in libraries. Every now and then someone comes up with the brilliant idea of speeding things up by doing, yes, something we have already been doing for many years.

We do have a larger backlog of donated material, some of which arrives in large and unpredictable quantities (after a death, for instance, or the retirement of an academic). We catalogue this material as and when we can, but it isn't planned for in the way the usual throughput of new books is. Basic records are added to the catalogue by assistants before they reach the cataloguers' shelves, so they can be found on the catalogue and requested if wanted.

Cataloguers do not process the books themselves (again, perhaps something which is not fully understood), so once we have catalogued and classified we think our work is done and the books have become a processing backlog (and the processors' backlog is not large either, except at times of staff shortage). Turnaround for processed books is usually 24 hours.

Anecdotal comment is very hard to prove or disprove. We monitor our throughput (for the new material), so we have evidence of the amount of time taken, and of course our empty shelves are there to see, if anyone would like to come and look. Perhaps we should lure our colleagues down to our lair (with cake?), and dispel the myths. Any suggestions gratefully received!

Words in vogue: Feedback

"Feedback" is a term borrowed from electronics, which isn't my forte, but if I have understood it correctly it means that information from a past occurrence is "fed" into the circuit or system to change or influence the next event. It is such a ubiquitous word now that its origins have been forgotten. Once upon a time it was not a word you ever heard, and I can remember thinking when I first heard it that it must have something to do with regurgitation - which, given the frequency with which our "feedback" is now invited, may not after all be far from the truth. Almost every activity today seems to involve the filling in of surveys, the often very arbitrary allocation of stars to just about anything, and the opportunity to let off steam. As commercial organisations try to gather information on their customers, they seem to be expecting those customers to spend a lot of time commenting on their products.

No one would question that companies and other services shouldn't aim to improve their services, but I wonder if one important element is not sometimes lost in the current "feedback" fetish: that it is supposed to contain actual information, not simply somebody's prejudices, or personal opinions which may not be based on any facts whatsoever. There are many surveys around at the moment inviting comments on public services, for instance (particularly ones which are under threat). People are told that there is less money to spend and, if they persist in saying that they would like to keep their existing services, are invited to suggest other economies, but often not with any hard facts about the budgets involved. It's an invitation for anyone to suggest that things they don't use themselves should be cut instead. Another peril for the public sector is the retreating of the state: central funds are cut, but locally that might mean that at the same time people are paying more (whether in council tax or in university tuition fees) - and it's not reasonable to expect every member of the public or student filling in surveys and providing "feedback" to be politically aware enough to know this.

It's a fairly unscientific process in the commercial world too. Book "reviews" on the best known book sites (such as Amazon and Goodreads) are the personal opinion of individuals, no more, no less - yet their prejudices might unduly influence the "rating" of an author, and if that author hasn't attracted many reviews (= opinion pieces) a negative one will have a disproportionate effect. This is obvious to many of us, and it doesn't mean we can't enjoy some of the reviews and sometimes value the opportunity to give our own opinion about books we have or haven't enjoyed, but it all needs to be taken with a generous dose of salt. If somebody doesn't like the idea that there are people in the United Kingdom who speak the Gaelic language on a daily basis, that's their personal opinion, not a valid criticism of a book set in the Outer Hebrides which makes this fact a part of the story. It doesn't mean the "feedback" is telling you anything at all other than that the reader has a certain set of opinions which don't coincide with those of the author of the book. I think authors should try to ignore these things, but that is easier said than done, especially if you might be at a stage in your career when you can't be sure that it won't make a difference.

Try remembering a B&B or hotel which you have stayed at and thought was perfectly acceptable, and then go and look at what some people have said about it on Tripadvisor. There are legitimate criticisms, of course, but there are many unreasonable people out there who seem to think that all hotels should be redecorated every year, that spiders in an English hotel in the autumn are somehow to be avoided in well-run establishments, and that bed linen should be changed daily. Some of the comments made must be very hurtful for small businesses working hard and trying to keep going in an unfriendly economic climate.

Then there's the irritation factor. Every time you visit some websites, or so it seems, you are biffing away pop-up messages wanting you to give feedback. It will only take ten minutes! We value your opinion! Isn't there any way these things could at least not pop up until you have had a chance to look at the thing? Even worse, shops which bombard you with emails requesting reviews for everything you buy. Start going down that route and you find yourself stumbling over more and more hurdles. You must have a password, AND a pen name, which must not be the same as anyone else's (four attempts later you hit on something nobody else has used), and then your review is too short, or too long. Excuse me, I don't actually work for your shop, so how about not making it so difficult!

One obvious other problem with all this is that it almost invites negativity. I recently filled in an official survey about a library service in which one of the questions related to what were the deficiencies of the service and how could it be improved. I left the question blank, but the survey wouldn't allow this - so I found a positive way of answering, but surely the question is framed in such a way that expects fault to be found? One recent question in a survey at my own place of work was answered along the lines of "I think the library is fantastic - of course you can never have everything you want and in an ideal world there would be more [books, facilities], but it is great" - and this was recorded as a negative response. You have to be very careful what answers you give, and think of the motivation of the people who might analyse them!

I'm going to be a bit more circumspect in 2014 in how much time I spend on surveys generally, and I'm going to be very careful about how I answer any leading questions. I'm also going to be very sure not to let off steam in a way that might damage someone's career or the service they are trying to provide, unless there is a genuine reason for negativity which I can back up with real facts and information. Generally, I'd like to make a plea for less spite and less malice in reviewing, across the spectrum of commercial and public spheres - and for a more cautious approach in interpreting "feedback".