LIBRARY PERVERT GETS LIFE screamed the advert for the local newspaper.
Ooh-er. What does one have to do to earn such a sentence in a library?
Turns out he wasn’t in a library but had amassed one of his own, which he was generously willing to distribute on-line to those who shared his extraordinary tastes.
We learned to take newspaper posters with a large pinch of salt in the days when the street seller’s stall would proclaim FILM STAR DIES, or even, sometimes, FAMOUS FILM STAR DIES. If you were foolish enough to accept that as a come-on you had to scour the pages to find, usually on the inside bottom of page 2, a small paragraph announcing the death of someone of whom you had never heard (though you might recognise the name of the film mentioned).
I carried that kind of scepticism with me on the day John Smith died, when I happened to arrive in Manchester late morning. Many shops had put up hand written notices in their windows announcing LABOUR LEADER DIES. No on-line social networks & precious few mobile phones in those days, of course; I assumed it must be an event of local, rather than national significance, until the shock of learning otherwise.
