No Escape

Thanks for all your support. It helps so much to know I'm not alone. You bolstered my confidence and enabled me to confront the melee again. 

Even the Leeds Library is festooned with Christmas decorations. I was prepared to suffer in silence—until I realised that a tree had been placed opposite my usual spot, complete with flashing lights. These were not simple fairy lights, flashing on and off at regular intervals—I might have been able to cope with that—but subject to odd cycles of behaviour, twinkling rapidly for a while before developing a more languid approach to their annoying function. They would flash in synchrony and then in a random sequence, each one firing individually. They would occasionally all turn off, making it impossible not to start counting down the seconds before they came back on again, which they would, after a seemingly arbitrary delay. It couldn't possibly have been designed to be more annoying.

I turned them off. Not five minutes later, the head librarian came by and went to turn them back on again. I coughed and made a pained expression. She understood and relented. Not ten minutes more had passed when a member of her staff came by and turned them back on before I had a chance to stop her. I let it go. Then a few minutes later the head librarian returned and was surprised to see the tree lit up again. She read my body language, understood what must have happened, and turned them off. But it wasn't long before another member of her staff, thinking that someone had forgotten to turn them on, duly did the honours. That was the point at which I gave up and moved to the other side of the table. I was then finally able to get some writing done.