The Lending Library of Things

The catalogue runs to four hundred and six items and Winnie knows the position of every one.

Row A is power tools. Row B is garden. Row C is the domestic strangeness — the wallpaper steamer, the carpet cleaner, the thing for getting cherry stones out of cherries, which has gone out nine times in six years and which she refuses to discuss.

Row D is where it gets interesting.

Row D is events. Two gazebos, forty folding chairs, a bunting box, an urn that does sixty cups, and a set of trestle tables that have been to more weddings than most vicars.

The rules are on a laminated card. One week. Bring it back clean. If you break it, tell us — we would rather fix it than find it.

Nobody reads the card. Everybody obeys it. Winnie has thought about this a great deal and has concluded it is because the card is laminated, and lamination confers an authority out of all proportion to anything printed on it.

Here is what she has learned in six years behind the desk.

Nobody borrows a hedge trimmer.

They borrow a Saturday in which the hedge finally gets done, which is a different object, and which usually has something behind it. A visit. An inspection. A father-in-law. Once, memorably, a house sale that fell through on the Tuesday, and a man who came back with the trimmer and stood at the desk for a while not saying anything, and Winnie put the kettle on without being asked because that is the whole job.

Nobody borrows the sixty-cup urn for sixty cups of tea.

They borrow it for a funeral. Ninety per cent of the time, a funeral. Winnie can tell from the booking form, because people booking a funeral fill in the reason for loan box very carefully and people booking a birthday leave it blank.

She has a system for the urn. It goes out with a box of proper cups — not part of the catalogue, not in the system, her own, from a car boot sale in 2019 — because she decided early on that nobody should have to drink tea out of a paper cup at their mother's wake.

Nobody has ever mentioned the cups. They come back washed.

The gazebos are the exception. The gazebos are pure joy, every time, without fail. Nobody has ever borrowed a gazebo for a sad reason. If Winnie is having a bad week she looks at the gazebo bookings.

In March the council reviewed the funding.

She was asked to demonstrate impact, and she did it properly — she is not naive, she has worked in the public sector — with a spreadsheet, and a cost-per-loan figure, and a carbon calculation that a volunteer's nephew did for free and that was, frankly, magnificent.

The cost per loan was one pound eleven.

What she did not put in the spreadsheet, because there is no column for it:

That Mr Adeyinka comes in every second Thursday and borrows a spirit level he does not need, and stays forty minutes.

That the woman from the flats above the bookmaker's has now borrowed the sewing machine eleven times and has, in the process, acquired a trade.

That in 2022 two neighbours who had not spoken in four years both turned up for the same pressure washer and Winnie, who is not above this, told them it was a two-person job.

It isn't. It's clearly a one-person job.

They did the whole street.

The funding was renewed. The councillor who moved it said the cost-per-loan figure was compelling and Winnie thanked her sincerely, because it was, and because the spreadsheet had been a lot of work.

But she knows what the actual figure is.

Four hundred and six items. One pound eleven a loan. Two gazebos.

And a box of proper cups that is not in the system and never will be.