Cards expire. People move, people die, and the system tidies them away. Card 00311 has been renewed every three years for fifty years and it takes out the same book every February.
I have worked in the same branch library for twenty-nine years and I will be in it until they shut it, which they will.
I want to explain the membership system, because everything I am going to tell you is inside it and it is not complicated but it is exact.
Every borrower has a card with a number. Ours are six digits now but they were five when I started and the old ones were carried over with two zeros stuck on the front, which is why some of our numbers begin 00 and every one of those belongs to somebody who joined before 1989.
A card is live for three years. At the end of three years it lapses. To keep it, the borrower has to come in, in person, with something with their address on it, and we update the record and the card runs for another three.
That is the whole of it. Come in, show a bill, carry on.
If they do not come in, the card lapses, and after a further two years the record is archived, and after seven the record is deleted, because of data protection, and I have deleted thousands of them and it is the saddest button in this building.
Card 00311 was issued on the fourth of March 1974.
It has been renewed seventeen times. The last renewal was in the November before last and it runs to next year.
Seventeen renewals means that seventeen times, in fifty years, somebody has stood at that desk with a utility bill and had that card updated, and on every one of those occasions a member of staff has typed their initials into the record, because we have always done that and the system keeps it.
There are nine sets of initials on that record over fifty years. Six of them belong to people who are dead. Two belong to people I could ring up this afternoon. And one set is mine.
I do not remember doing it.
That is the first thing that made me look properly, in about 2011, when I was going through the pre-1989 numbers for a stock report and the renewal history came up on the screen.
My initials, twice. Once in 1998 and once in 2004.
I have no memory of it, and I want to be fair to myself here: I have renewed perhaps forty thousand cards. Nobody remembers a renewal. It takes ninety seconds and involves looking at a gas bill.
But I would remember this one, because of what it borrows.
Card 00311 borrows one book. It has borrowed one book, fifty times, in fifty years, and nothing else.
The book is a county history. A proper one, hardback, nineteen sixty-something, four hundred pages of parish boundaries and enclosure acts and photographs of men standing next to machinery. We have two copies. One is reference and one is lending.
It goes out in the first week of February and it comes back in the first week of March. Every year. Fifty times.
Never late. Not once in fifty years has that book been a day overdue, which if you know anything about libraries is more unlikely than everything else in this put together.
I started paying attention properly in 2014 and I have kept notes since, so what follows I can stand behind.
The loan is always issued at the desk, not the self-service machine, which means a member of staff processed it, which means a person was stood there.
I have been on that desk in the first week of February eleven times since 2014 and I have never once seen it happen.
Twice I have been the member of staff whose initials are on the issue.
The second time, in 2019, I was ready. I had the date in my diary. I worked the desk the whole of that week and I did not leave it except for one twenty-minute break on the Thursday afternoon.
The issue is timestamped 14:52 on the Thursday.
The other thing about the record is the address, and this is where I stopped talking about it at work.
Every renewal needs proof of address, so the record holds one, and it has been updated seventeen times, and I can see all seventeen because the system keeps a history for exactly that reason.
The first address, in 1974, is a house on a street I know well.
The second, in 1977, is a different house on the same street.
And so on. Seventeen addresses over fifty years, and I have plotted them, and they walk. Not randomly. They go up one side of that street from number 4 to number 38, in order, one house at a time, never skipping, and then they cross over and start coming back down the other side, and the last one, the one that is live now, is number 27.
There are thirteen houses left on that side.
I did the thing you would do. I went to number 27.
It is a normal house with a normal door and I stood on the step and I did not knock, and a woman came out of number 29 with a bin and said all right, and I said I was from the library, which was true, and she said, oh they're away.
I said, are they, do you know when they're back.
She said, no, love, I don't know them really. They keep themselves to themselves. Nice enough.
And then, because she wanted to be helpful, she said, mind you, they must be back, the curtains have been different.
I have not told anybody at work. I have told my sister, once, badly, after a Christmas do, and she thought it was a lovely little story and asked if I had thought about writing it down, and here we are.
What I have done instead is a thing I am not proud of, which is that I have started making sure I am not on the desk in the first week of February.
I take the leave. It is a quiet week and nobody minds.
Because the two times my initials are on that record are the two times I did not know to be somewhere else, and I have thought about what that means for about ten years now, and the only version I can make sense of is the one where it does not matter whether I am there.
The card comes up for renewal next year.
It will be renewed, and somebody's initials will be on it, and there are four of us who work that desk.
I have started leaving the county history in the reference section instead of lending. It is a small thing and it is against our own rules and I have done it twice now, in January, quietly, so it cannot go out in February.
Both times it has been back on the lending shelf by the last week of the month, in the right place, spine out, with the ticket in it.
And both times the loan has gone through on the Thursday afternoon, at ten to three, from a shelf where I had made sure the book was not.