ur story in The Buzz (Page 13) this week about the library book that was 43 years overdue gave me an attack of the guilts. As a high school student, I team, I was shocked to find that I was not alone. Mari’s husband Peter moved around a lot as a kid when his dad worked in foreign affairs. ‘He used to borrow English-language books from Australia’s Overseas Library Service, when there was such a thing,’ she told us. ‘But he forgot to return one, an Australian poetry book, which has stayed in the family ever since.’ Jude also had a wildly overdue book, but when the library had an amnesty, she popped it in the chute, and still remembers the blessed sense of relief! Julia has a book about the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud that she ‘borrowed’ by mistake when the fire alarm went off while she was studying at the uni library. ‘I just gathered up all the books around me and it was one of them,’ she said. ‘I still have it and whenever I’m having a bad day, I think it’s bad karma at work for stealing Freud!’ But for the rest of the team, talk of late fees was all about renting videos. Remember them? Lisa was once reported to a credit agency for an overdue video she’d borrowed from Blockbuster. ‘When I look back, I would have been better off buying the videos,’ she said. Thank goodness for Netflix!
