Libraries, corduroy and dragons

Bizarre dreams last night, which is almost certainly the consequence of too much cheese before bedtime. One dream in particular managed to wake me up; I dreamed that I’d gone back to Upminster, where I grew up, and found that the rather pleasing 1960s library had been mostly demolished (almost exactly 5/6ths demolished, since I paced it out in the dream) and that the front had been replaced with a ghastly Victorian gothic revival church-like exterior. The innards were no better; the current light and airy interior had been replaced with a gloomy vault, and there was absolutely no wheelchair access to be seen. I can remember ranting about this appalling decision (and threatening to invoke the wrath of the Twentieth Century Society) to all and sundry, including the librarians and the architect. Sadly there are no photographs of Upminster library on the web, so I can’t really demonstrate why I was so upset about the change.

Besides dreaming of libraries, I’ve been hitting the sales with this week, and am now the owner of more corduroy than is probably healthy, thanks to the heavy discounting in M&S. Other sales have been poor. Monsoon moved their entire menswear section out during the sales – are there any other stores that discriminate aginst an entire gender during the sales? So much for picking up overpriced clothes at acceptable prices.

Finally for those that missed it (most likely ), there was a repeat of the Radio 4 documentary Dicing with Dragons yesterday, which is available on the BBC’s listen again service here. Dead good.