The library was shut all day.

This was annoying. Well, he had thought that Early Closing Days were bad enough (and on the way out, in any event). But, now, he was faced with this – surely it was little short of a scandal. He had lugged a mighty tome of V.S. Pritchett’s Collected Stories, which he had been renewing for some months whilst he waded slowly through them. Having recently been made redundant, he had decided to return it on a Wednesday instead of his more usual visits on a Saturday. He had finally finished with an enjoyable lunge through the last hundred pages or so in one sitting. And now he had to lug it home again, irritation adding materially to its weight. What if his body had a controlled shut down for one whole day? How many people would be put out? He smiled for perhaps the first time that Wednesday.

Published 'The Third Half' 1993