Visit to a local library is long overdue

Read Andy's column every week in the Western Morning News

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It doesn’t sound like much of a bucket list item for summer, but I must get to the library soon. It’s a long time since I stepped in one, for some reason, but I've got to thinking about them lately.

Growing up, libraries bring up some pleasant memories for me. One of the earliest was walking to the library at Filton, on Bristol's outer suburbs, with my grandparents and their dogs.

Then there was the library in the small Dorset town where I went to school. It had a green carpet and was always pleasingly quiet, with a sort of musty smell you get from printed paper.

Wandering among the aisles of titles, all neatly jacketed in clear plastic and carefully numbered, felt like an entire world of possibility.

Not that I was very adventurous with my reading, that has taken much longer to achieve.

Instead I had my favourite authors like Roald Dahl, and a penchant for the Fighting Fantasy books where you chose your own adventure, and could die on the very next turn of the page and have to start again.