Quiet libraries

In the US I made plenty of use of the Columbus Metropolitan Library system. Later I mostly used the Rochambeau^* Library in Providence then the Belmont Public Library in Massachusetts. Over many years I never noticed these places being anything other than quiet.

We spend the occasional Saturday afternoon at the Central Library in Dundee. It's surprisingly noisy. We have students and tutors talking at desks, we have beginners' recorder practice (yesterday), we have people using the wifi to make video calls from their laptop, we have people eating snacks messily and leaving the debris all over, we once had folk music filling the whole place, and lately we've often had the librarians themselves having loud conversations about trivia (again yesterday, How was your day off? and more). And I'm thinking, Really?. Perhaps the modern way is to make the library into some kind of broader community center^† but if I just want to sit and read then I'm increasingly finding the library absolutely not the place to attempt it. At least if I head to the top floor and around a corner people don't usually even notice exists then I can usually find a table somewhere that is enough away from noisy people.

I was wondering if this is a Dundee thing or a British thing or just me getting old and moaning about the kids these days. It may be Dundee as I don't recall noisiness in any of the Perthshire library branches that we use.

^*General Rochambeau was in Providence with the French Army helping the Americans to fight the British.

^†After all, yesterday we were there so that the children could watch a Pokémon film in the branch's cinema!

Parliamentary proceedings

Watching the House of Commons can be entertaining if one forgets their involvement in governance: it is rather too much showmanship. The House of Lords can be interesting to see when some of them have experience and interesting points to share but my favorite is probably the select committees wherein a panel of MPs question a few experts on some topic. It's often not very educational but it's reassuring to see at least some semblance of truth-seeking occurring among the corridors of power and these days BBC iPlayer makes them convenient to watch.

Perhaps American committee hearings for the Senate or House are similar but I don't actually remember watching those. On C-SPAN I'd be more likely to watch Book TV or somesuch (possibly even Prime Minister's Questions). Some courtroom-related stuff is televised in the US too: perhaps I was also more likely to watch parole hearings or some other aspect of the system at work.