The Swallows meet

Just a week to go and the Swallows met in Gateshead this morning to talk about the arrangments for our trip next week. Here we all are at Gateshead Old Town Hall where Ann is based (Left to right - Laurayne, Ann, Mark).

The Premier and her party arrive in the Region tomorrow and we are due to meet them all on Saturday at the Library in Gateshead for a presentation and a chance to talk about our plans.

On Saturday night we are all looking forward to sitting down at the Theatre Royal to watch "Elephant". I am hoping that we get to see just a few of the real thing when we reach Africa and I know that I am not the only one. We are all looking forward to the experience so much.

This week has been very busy. The schools have gone back and there is much more traffic on the roads. We have had some very windy weather and this has caused quite a few problems round the country. In Newcastle yesterday, the main roads across the Tyne were badly affected. Of the three available bridges, two were out of action and the other is not a particularly easy route for traffic, so it was chaos. To end the day well, in the early hours of this morning, parts of the UK including the North East felt an earthquake which was of quite a significant magnitude. A number of people at work felt this and some were even woken by it. It's rare to get this in England and a quake of 5 on the Richter scale is unheard of.

So, this time next week, we will be en route for Dubai and our onward flight to Johannesburg.

Weekend in sight

Mmm, I have blinked and the week seems to have gone.

Half Term here has meant a lot of people are on holiday so it's been a little bit quieter than normal. Weather is warmer than it was but it's very windy today and I wonder if the side of the library is about to fall off every now and then. It certainly sounds rather like Wuthering Heights in here. The cloud has cleared a little though and this always helps to make it feel a bit more spring like here on the north east coast. Glad I am not on the ferry going out of North Shields today... the sea looks very rough!

Yesterday was more exciting though. We got the chance to attend the filming of the BBC's Question Time programme which had been planned to take place on March 6th around about the time we would be arriving in East London. The programme was switched at the last minute because of the hot topic of the Northern Rock Bank Nationalisation which has been taking place this week. We rang up yesterday to see if there were any spaces left and managed to get a couple of seats. I haven't seen a television programme put together like this before and it was fascinating. The programme runs for an hour and is shot in one take, with a panel of politicians and experts taking questions from the Audience. The whole process was very slick indeed and it was fun to see ourselves on the front row when the programme went out late last night.

Only another week to go before we prepare for our trip to the Cape. Have been reading up some of the background to the area and its history. We have also had the details of the visit by Premier Balindlela to our Region starting next week and I am looking forward to being part of that. We will be meeting the party at Gateshead Central Library on March 1st to talk about our library development here in the North East over the past few years.

Monday and Tuesday have slipped away

It's late on Tuesday afternoon and it's been another lovely day here - this has meant a very sharp frost though and like yesterday it was -2.5 this morning on the way to work. The mad thing is that by about 2.30pm the sun has reached my windows (there are a lot of them) and it's up to about 30degrees in here. Hence the need for the not very effective air conditioners. It's quiet this week both at work and on the roads coming in. Half term has come at the local schools so it's busy in town as a consequence but the rush hour isn't as bad as normal.

Yesterday was spent in my office dealing with bits and pieces rather than anything major. That's what takes the time up really. Our branch Library at Whitburn reopened as well and today it has been the "Official Opening" of the new South Tyneside Homes Office which has been added to the side of the library. South Tyneside's Mayor did the honours and cut the ribbon. The library looks a lot more spacious and we are all pleased with the results of our efforts. We would have liked to have undertaken a complete refurbishment but unfortunately our budget wouldn't run to that. The work has allowed us to fit a few more computers into a fairly small space and I know that this will be popular. The Children's Library also looks much nicer with its new shelves, seats and book boxes. We get very good support for our children's and adults events here and the new meeting room which has come as a part of the new extension will be very useful for us.

Only two weeks to go now till we board the plane and I am haunting the pages of Flickr to find pictures of the Eastern Cape so that I know what it looks like. Reading the newspaper each day seems to suggest a lot of rain at the moment. Here's hoping for some sunny weather when we get there. We get enough rain here!

Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon has arrived and it is cooler as they promised. Today is one of those grey Northern days which is neither one thing or the other. Have been out to our library at Whitburn this afternoon where we are about to reopen with a few improvements after a six week closure. Our shelving there was over forty years old and we have replaced it with some newer units which we bought from a bookshop in Sunderland who had gone out of business. The children's area has had some purpose built units installed and all in all it looks much better. Our Housing Company, South Tyneside Homes, has also built a small extension to the building to house their enquiries office.

I notice, from the Daily Despatch website in East London, that there have been freak storms which have caused flash floods. Strangely this is something we are all getting used to in England too. It's only a few weeks since a similar but probably slightly colder, storm caused havoc in the uplands of West Yorkshire and around the West of England again. Last year we had devastating floods in the Severn Valley so we all appreciate the difficulties when you are faced with too much water. It is interesting to read the local newspaper from so far away and to get a flavour of the kinds of issues which face people in the Eastern Cape. They look remarkably similar in some ways.

I have also found out this week that there is a strange coincidence to our visit to South Africa. My grandfather, whose family came from Northampton in the Midlands of England, had an uncle George who I vaguely remember my father telling me ended up living in Durban. We don't have many family photos from that side of the family and most of them are no longer with us so we have to rely on bits of information from my grandmother, who is still alive. I do have a picture of this particular man though, and, on the rear under the backing paper it has an inscription which says it was taken in 1924 in East London. I am fascinated to know what he was doing there but also a bit aware that I might not want to know. From what I can gather, East London in 1924 wasn't a particularly happy place to be and you find yourself wondering what kind of people your ancestors were.

Hotter than the Cape

The unseasonal weather here continues and my office is now hotter than the Cape! We are told it's going to get colder toward the end of the week and at least I will be able to turn off my air conditioner then. It doesn't seem to work that well - the office faces west and towards the end of the day can get unbearable as there are no air handlers or ventilation at all.

We've spent the afternoon trying to wade through the complexities of the replacement of our People's Network computer systems. The computers which we were able to install as part of our Government funded scheme are now six years old and although they are still running, they are very outdated and we do receive more negative feedback from our customers now. The difficulty has also arisen that because some machines were put in later they have different operating systems in some cases and different packages. We hope that we can make the case to have them replaced by our ICT department over a couple of years and have already had some indication that they'd consider this over the next couple of years.

Ann, Laurayne and I have been in touch today to sort out a visit to see Elephant at the Theatre Royal and also to organise a session at the Central Library in Gateshead before we go, to meet with the Premier and the MEC's party. It will be great to talk to them before our visit.

Today has been interesting in that Central Government have announced a new scheme to guarantee that school children are given 5 hours per week of cultural experience. It's not entirely clear how this will be delivered yet and we are expecting more information after a local meeting with a number of our local Art and Cultural organisations. There will be a number of pilot schemes which it would be good to be part of and library services have been identified as part of this cultural offer.

Exciting day

Just another day in the life really but it ended up exciting! This morning in South Tyneside was very sunny but very cold. It's still midwinter here so a fine day means a cold one - mind you it hasn't been like that all over the UK today. Temperatures in Wales apparently have been up to an unseasonal 18 degrees C.

The work day was not particularly special - a Principal Officers Senior Team meeting to start the day with a discussion on workforce development. The main issues we identified were the challenges now in recruiting young people to work in our Local Government and the "generalisation" of jobs which has meant a lack of people trained in specialist work.

The afternoon was spent dealing with staffing issues, planning for next year's budgets and their implications. Sent some details to the Council's web team for a page to advertise and promote the National Year of Reading in our Borough. Spoke to our colleague at the Museums Libraries and Archives Council in Newcastle to discuss a proposal for a Regional Coordinator to look at the Year of Reading across our twelve library authorities. Late afternoon the day got much more exciting with the news that our tickets for South Africa are booked and we are all set to board the plane on March 6th. Now planning our visit to watch Elephant at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle on March 1st.

Here goes with our collective blog for our journey to the Southern Hemisphere to meet our colleagues in the Eastern Cape Provincial Library Service. It's three weeks to go and we are all very excited at the prospect of making the long journey south to a different world.

Today we received the first draft of our journey through the Eastern Cape to visit a number of libraries and to take part in the planned Indaba at the Mpkweni Beach Resort in Mid March. I confess to having searched the web for photographs of the countryside to see what it's going to look like and I can't wait for the experience of travelling through the open spaces of South Africa.

We're all looking forward to seeing how a different country develops its library service, especially one which has such huge challenges but such a great opportunity to look at its service from a new viewpoint. It's almost impossible to think about the size of the Province - I have to keep comparing it to the UK and the thought of having to run a service across such a wide area is both frightening and stimulating. It will be great to take our experience to the Cape but for us to learn from colleagues there as part of the visit.

The photo shows a very different coast to the one we'll see in the Eastern Cape but one with strange similarities too. The North East shares with the Eastern Cape a "Wild Coast", a rural hinterland and a number of coastal towns, ports and cities. Our ports are like those of the Eastern Cape, busy functional but attractive places with a long and varied history.

We are all impatient to get there.... all we need now are our tickets! Mark.