The radiators in Walkley Library clank like someone dropping spanners down a stairwell, and they do it roughly every forty minutes, usually just after you have unmuted yourself to say something sensible. I found this out on Wednesday 5 February at about ten past two, with my work laptop open on a long table by a tall window and my phone propped against a stack of large-print crime novels.
We had been in the house four days and had no broadband. The engineer was booked for the next morning, so I had decided to work from home on the strength of a phone hotspot. One morning of video calls ate nearly 3GB of my data and left the phone as warm as a hot-water bottle. After lunch I packed the laptop into a rucksack and walked down the hill.
Four days at the same table
The engineer came on the Thursday and left again, beaten by the pole across the road. I went back to the library on the Friday with a flask, then the Wednesday after, then the Friday after that. By Wednesday 19 February the second visit had worked and my office was the box room once more, which makes four library days in all. It felt like more. The walk down is ten minutes. The walk back up with a laptop and half a flask of tea is a different sentence.
The building is a Carnegie library from 1904, run by volunteers these days, with high windows, a gallery rail and a floor that creaks in roughly the same places as our landing. The wi-fi is free and the password is on a laminated card at the desk. Tea from the urn was 70p in a proper cup and saucer, which rattled in time with the radiators, so I got the full orchestra. When I asked a volunteer about the clanking she said, "They're sulking. They've been sulking since 1974."
What a weekday sounds like
Wednesday mornings belong to the toddler group in the back room. From about ten the building fills with a tambourine, a great deal of enthusiastic singing and the odd wail that makes every adult holding a mug look up in sympathy. For video calls I booked the side room on a clipboard at the desk. It has a table, two chairs and a window onto the car park, and I took a half-past-nine team call in there with my coat on.
Payroll information stays inside the work laptop's own security, and I asked my manager before I went. She said a library was fine as long as it wasn't a café, and that I should keep my back to the wall. So I sat with my back to the wall for four days, feeling like a very dull spy. A retired man in the corner did the crossword in pen every time I was there, and by the Friday we had progressed to nodding.
The book trolley
By the door there is a trolley of books for sale, 50p for paperbacks and £1 for hardbacks, with an honesty tin that I got to know well. Over four days I came away with a 1980s one-pot cookery book (£1, and at the time we owned exactly two pans), a thriller I finished in a day, and a slim book of old photographs of Walkley with horses on the hill. I went through it twice looking for our row of four. We aren't in it, but the hill is, and it looks just as steep with a cart on it.
I still go down on the odd Friday when the box room starts to feel like a cupboard. Yesterday I stayed until three, put a pound in the tin and walked back up with a paperback I'd bought for the cover. Matt asked how the office was. "Cold at first," I said, "and then there was a book sale."
