Colm O'Regan: Libraries are a tonic in these mad times

It’s like living in the future. Access to every book in the country? Just log in and ask for it.

Whenever I’m down, I think about the library. Not because I want to go there right now. I do. But that’s not the point. It just makes me feel good that libraries exist. In this cold and often above-average rainfall world, it’s a warm place.

“They” reckon libraries started, like most things, in Nineveh in Mesopotamia (in Iraq) about 5,000 years ago, and were largely storing clay tablets.

Most early libraries were places of keeping records. You couldn’t go in and say would you have the latest James Patterson for tablet, like you can now.

Now, it’s like living in the future. Access to every book in the country? Just log in and ask for it. As a child, I imagined if Tanora was coming out of the tap. This is better. But it teaches patience.

Yes, the book you want is there, but you’ll have to wait until the other person brings it back. When is that? When they’ve finished with it.

It’s good to be told you have to share, as a grown-up. But eventually the book is back, then whisked from the return bin to a waiting van. I’d like to think that van driver is not as stressed as the poor divils breaking their backs delivering your Temu shite on time.

The book will come in its own good time. You get an email and then you go and collect it from your nearest branch. There’s your name next to the other requests in alphabetical order by your name. I wonder whether people have a sneak peek at what their alphabetical neighbours are ordering. Do O’Reillys and O’Redmonds look at my requests and think, “The durty fecker”.

I do miss the book tickets, though. The history of the book’s borrowings being stamped by date. That’s such an old thing now. The design of a library ticket is an old museum artefact, like a telephone receiver or those mad welders’ visors people wore during covid. 

Instead, when you bring the book back, the machine just gives a little beep as it reads the RFID (radio frequency identification tag) somewhere on your book. I feel the book is chatting to the check-in machine. What’s it been saying about me? Does it mention toast crumbs by any chance?

Or you mightn’t borrow a book at all. You just go in. For a think.

There is the ‘Read The Newspaper Section’, where the same group of men in every library in the country gather every week. Same hats and scarves and mysterious bags.

Tomorrow, Saturday, is Ireland Reads Day.

Soon, I will be old enough to join them.

Each of us thinking separately about men’s sheds. But maybe it’s the last place to unfurl a big broadsheet, no wind, plenty of wing-room. I taught my eldest how to “work the newspaper” recently. She had no idea how to fold it back for the inner pages. It was like I’d taught her how to snare a rabbit.

I have only one ambition left, library-wise. To sit in a travelling mobile library van, like the one that used to park at Dripsey Cross.

Sometimes, it parked on a hump so the floor sloped like a bat-villain cave. I’d love to go long-distance. Imagine, just going from Cork to Dublin, lost in a book and then looking up and realising the section between the McDonalds (J8) and the Supermac’s (J3) had zipped by.

It could be a post-apocalyptic TV show. All the clues to rebuilding civilisation inside an old Iveco van. All except how to make the antidote, which is currently being checked out by some clown up the country who got plenty of email reminders to bring it back before the Fall. And we have to get to him. But crucially, they still don’t have to pay a fine.

• Tomorrow, Saturday, is Ireland Reads Day. Visit irelandreads.ie