We’re always happy to receive a ‘Letter to the Editor’ to share with our large online readership. If you have something you want to share, get in touch. The author of this letter preferred to remain anonymous, going under the name, Vectensis. Ed
Vectensis, South Wight
So who remembers ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Fahrenheit 541’? A sedentary population is spoon-fed an hourly and worthless diet of celebrity news and advertisements. All books removed, citizens fearful of committing ‘knowledge crime. 800 tiresome culture fanatics gassed in the British Museum. Fiction? Yes. Prophesy?
Well, with haste we might just manage a last request from our local or mobile library on the Isle of Wight before it is closed down. Better be quick!
That helpful and professional librarian, with that letter of impending redundancy in pocket, is already poised with the ‘Withdrawn’ stamp at the chute leading to the incinerator. On fear of instant dismissal he or she will be unable to explain the predicament of that revered library service that has shaped all of our lives.
‘Deliver value for money’ or become discarded
On our offshore ‘minibritain’ a carefully crafted agenda for insular mediocrity is rolling forward. When requesting a definitive work concerning our Island history I was told that ‘yes’ it had been purchased but it has since been discarded because it had failed to ‘deliver value for money’.
The accountants have been very busy throughout all of England’s libraries. I am not totally surprised to find they were sent by Gordon Brown. The pin-stripe outcome has been predictably grotesque. Under those bizarre principles of ‘performance measurement’, our reference books have all failed to ‘earn shelf space’. (If they’re not booked out, the bean-counters can’t measure them, so its good news for pulp fiction but bad news for students and researchers. (No score? No brownie points in Treasury’s rate-support caslculation).
Reference material moved to a warehouse
On our island, reference works have been removed to a remote industrial warehouse far out-of-town. Our Council now demands a phone request and appointment for permission to view a particular volume – if it is still there!
Factual knowledge; continuing education and improvement; life-long learning; access to out-of-print literature ? Only by permission through the gritted teeth of the Isle of Wight Council. The message to our children is clear enough. Your place is at your play-station. Killo-zap good. Reading bad, and possibly damaging to the order of Island society.
Some of us have already been lamely asked whether we have tried looking on line? The answer is yes of course I’ve been looking on line but I am sorry to say that I am still sufficiently aware to realise that the information offered on the relevant websites is dependent on the primary sources contained in the very books that my council is so anxious to remove.
Promulgation of ignorance
In short, promulgation of ignorance is built into the Isle of Wight Council’s agenda and given our physical isolation it can be achieved more readily here. (Government, incidentally, denies that we live on an island. Treasury slicksters have designated us an ‘estuarine anomaly’ so we cannot apply for European island-status grants).
For so many questioning young Islanders and students of all ages, the route to improved knowledge is now very firmly blocked. This policy of deprivation and containment should prove a very rewarding experiment for our bright Janus-headed Etonocracy because only ‘those with means’ can afford to travel to a real library on the mainland. There are only 133,000 of us and we surely learn our place.
At the next turn of the screw we might predict a request form and possibly an interview when requesting a stored book. I won’t yet call it an interrogation. The procedure will be wrapped in one of our Council’s wonderful euphemisms like ‘monitoring performance in the interests prioritised service delivery’.
Kafkaresque
By now all qualified librarians will be drawing dole so goodness knows who will make this Kafkaresque judgement but we might rest assured that the refusal to provide the book will be based on ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘planned resource delivery’ and nothing to do with the fact that the Committee Chairman does not recognise a need for a book like that.
Down in the Isle of Wight Council Chamber a few more special euphemisms may be needed to nod through some final changes on one of those pre-agreed voting agendas. It will probably read something like applying ‘what if’ analytical outcomes to the re-profiled spend trajectory for planned mid-range cultural resource management within approved prioritised fiscal parameters.
No need to agonise over these dreadful transient terms because, on the advice of some astonishingly expensive consultants, the words can be changed regularly with the sole purpose of getting highly unpopular doctrinal policies past an exhausted, and hopefully inattentive, press reporter in the public gallery.
Shiping our Island’s archives and cultural collections
The Blue Meanie army is now so vast that everyone else has given up. Huxley’s nightmare world is their New Jerusalem and they are now planning to ship our Island’s archives and cultural collections to a deep vault somewhere (anywhere) on the mainland. Should make a good auction in a few years time!
Well I still have my Isle of Wight Library card but when it falls out with my credit card it all becomes a bit embarrassing when one has to admit hailing from Coalition Britain’s experimental deprivation colony on the Isle of Ignorance.
Still, I still have my handy bus pass to get me to the British Museum. With luck, I might just make it in time to join hands with some other obsolete old buffers around the Rosetta stone before Mustapha Monde sends in those cheery-faced heavy boys to administer the gas canisters. Goodbye ‘color’, ‘favorites’ and American Megadeath V, a bane to me no longer. ‘Oh brave new world that has such people in it’!
Vectensis
