charles barrow's writing

I just turned around and walked quickly away when I saw this. Photo is the author's own.

So the Government continues to slash public spending and public services continue to suffer. Ensuring that those with the least have access to even less.  There is more talk of yet more library closures. Those that survived the first few rounds of cuts by tightening their belts until they could barely breathe will finally have their oxygen machines switched off completely. A defender of this policy missed the point, I thought, on a radio interview when he claimed that libraries are an irrelevance because all the literature that they contain is available on the internet. All apologists for library closures miss the point I reckon when they offer up the internet as an alternative library.  I think there is an obvious distinction to be made here. Literature is available to download from the internet, books aren't. Books as physical objects are available to borrow free from a library. Books as beautiful physical objects to be handled and cherished. As a child I fell in love with