I can't be bought but a loan is negotiable

A piece of history ended last Friday when I was persuaded to retire my library card and get one of the nice new ones. I was in shock after realising that one no longer carried the books one wanted to borrow to the desk, to be checked out by a librarian. No, one waved them over a device which reminds me of the price checker on a supermarket checkout. I had gone right past it, the concept of such not having entered my brain.

My old yellow card was one of the last in circulation and was issued some years before the 9 was added to the beginning of phone numbers. The sticker was a makeshift patch job. Maybe the card could become part of Lost Perth? They let me keep it when I admitted a certain attachment. I guess after, let's see, roughly 40 odd years of book-borrowing, they trust me not to double dip.

Our city library itself is having an upgrade. It moved from the "bunker," the underground realm reached by a narrow set of yellow stairs, to temporary quarters about two years ago, with some of their books still in storage, but is supposed to move into a building resembling a cross between something vaguely Greek and columnar, and a spiky tin can, once it is finished. I will take a picture of this at some point. It's going to provide more space than the library has ever had, as well as putting it in a convenient central location for me, but I rather miss the bunker.