No One Had It Better

Cardiff Central’s new library opened at the end of last month, so it’s been open for about six weeks now. Upon the ribbon being sluiced and the revolving door being manually spun for the first time, this building instantly became the best thing in Cardiff, no questions asked, even less answered. Winchester’s library reopened a couple of years ago; a massively inferior complex built in a hexagonal geometric anomaly that looks like a Micro Machines replica of the Library Of Congress annexed to a smoothie bar, but having revisited the Winchester ‘Discovery Centre’ (no libraries allowed, under Hampshire County Council rulings) I made a few base-level conclusions.

My new book shop or library test is the Richard Ford test. Richard Ford is an amazing author, his most well known work being the Frank Bascombe Trilogy; The Sportswriter (probably the single greatest novel I’ve ever suffered the ecstasy of reading), Independence Day (the much lauded sequel) and The Lay of the Land (The finale), all of which I would recommend to anyone without even merest hesitation. The Richard Ford test is to see whether the literary institution in question has any Richard Ford books in it, especially the ones which aren’t the Bascombe novels The Winchester ‘Discovery‘ Centre, despite being several stories smaller than Cardiff’s magnum opus, and generally giving the impression that antique pig farmer swap meets and crusty folk nights are as important, if not more so, to a libarary as the books themselves, it has a shitload of Ford. Including, I was excited momentarily to see, a copy of Wilderness, which is pretty much impossible to find anywhere except the obvious. It almost made me want to join in the discovery, but I wasn’t carrying twenty five proofs of address, my passport or a portable retina scan. Cardiff Central Library had zero Richard Ford books in it. None! Zero! Zip! Zilch! Fucking nothing-a-doodle-doo. Failure.

That’s about the only fault that springs to mind though, the rest of it is a ridiculous geometrical nightmare, that looks like it was designed by a box of schoolchildren in a wet playtime, but it so overbearing and exciting, you can’t help but run around inside getting overexcited by things you’ve seen a million times before. There are pointless ostentatious chairs which you can’t sit on wearing a dress (not that I was), hundreds of special chairs with arm rests on, which I didn’t think would work at all, until I sat down in one by a window on the top floor, overlooking the sex shop on Mill Lane and the Wyndham Arcade, and realised that they are anatomical perfection for the lazy reader. You’re physically forced to sit hunched over a book and consume that fucker.

There are entire floors or half-floors dedicated to things I don’t understand, and machines that look like CAT Scanners and bent backed old duffers plonking about using light emitting desktop computers and sprawling out maps and other technical documents one step away from being tapestries. They also have these audiobooks which are basically miniature mp3 players with the book loaded onto them, so all you have to do is slot in headphones and it’s party time with Peter Carey. I loaned His Illegal Self and then spent the rest of the gloomy April afternoon before going to James’s birthday drinks, meandering around Bute Park in figures of 8 listening to a woman attempt a variety of bad accents and age-affected vocal lilts as she tried to convey an Italian American, a teenage teller, an elderly grandmother and small boy all having one conversation. It was like watching someone trying to juggle a ball, a knife, a tortoise and a flaming globdule of filthy wax, on a unicycle. Also, and this wasn’t any credit to the library, apart from maybe being rewarded for existing, but in the reading area where they chuck all the daily papers for people to read (alas, not on giant sticks), but there was a Muslim reading a copy of The Satanic Verses. I saw him later outside Boots and he was still reading it. I’m not sure why this was such a good thing, but it was.

There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is explaining to, I think Jerry and George about how good he is at karate, because he’s significantly better at kicking the ass of the other people in his class. The joke comes from the fact he’s joined a beginners karate class with a bunch of 8 and 9 year olds who are obviously going to have their ass kicked by a lanky hipster doofus. A couple of days ago I went and saw a terrible British comedy called Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel, starring erm, The Irish Guy from The IT Crowd, Shirley Ghostman, and some odious wanker who can’t act, but was in Shameless. Inexplicably, this film also has Anna Faris in it, who can pretty much top the US box office off her own merit, so what she’s doing in this low budget and more or less unwatchable British Sci Fi “lads down the boozer” comedy is beyond me. But she’s Anna Faris, and is therefore completely awesome by default, and this is where the Seinfeld comparison comes in, because she’s so much better than everything else about the film, it’s like watching a 34 year old powerhouse. doing karate with a feeble 9 year old. I was tempted to write her a letter, but that’s a bit 2006.