Do you feel strongly about a local issue which you think local politicians and aspirants for the Houses of Parliament are keeping quiet about until after the General Election?

Then why not take one of the many opportunities to ask a question of the candidates?

The newspapers have published the venues, starting with Kirkbymoorside Methodist Church this coming Thursday evening.

In addition to large environmental issues, there are locally plenty of topics for you to put forward: the imminent threats to TICs (Tourist Information Centres), to subsidised bus services, children’s and youth services and libraries.

On Saturday morning in one of coastal/Ryedale libraries, a sizeable group enjoyed a talk by a local author whose entertaining book topics include Rocks and Landscapes and The Floating Egg. His talk was a seemingly harmless tale of his customer service experiences in libraries. In this very library, I once bought a second-hand book, A Librarian’s Odyssey.

The writer’s adult life was as a Yorkshire wartime soldier in Norton and Malton (cricket when off duty), who, post-war, rose from local authority libraries to the Westminster City librarian and MCC libraries. In our seemingly topsy-turvy world we are urged to attend non-traditional libraries in phone boxes, pubs, village halls.

Equally eccentric is a government survey (Dept for Culture Media and Sport 2014) which attempts to quantify how happy different activities –including dance, swimming and libraries – make us. In the case of the libraries the uplift apparently is equivalent to a £1,359 pay rise. Fight for them please.

Improbable Libraries is published by Thames and Hudson, search for the government report online, and A Librarian’s Odyssey may be available too.

John Dean, Beadlam