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The library that lends drills

When Halyna Ivchenko took over the town library five years ago, she counted forty-one visitors in her first week. Most of them were over sixty. The building was warm and quiet and, as she puts it, very nearly a museum of itself.

Her solution began with a broken shelf. A neighbour asked whether the library owned a drill, because buying one for twenty minutes of work made no sense. Halyna borrowed a drill from her brother, lent it to the neighbour, and wrote the loan down in a school notebook. Within a month the notebook held sixteen names.

Today the library lends far more than books. There are three sewing machines, a set of camping tents, forty board games, a projector, and a shelf of garden tools that goes empty every April. Every item was donated by a resident who had used it twice and stored it for years. Nothing is bought.

The rules are short. You may borrow one item at a time, you keep it for a week, and you return it clean. There is no fee and no deposit. In five years, Halyna says, four items have not come back, which she considers an acceptable price.

What she did not expect was the effect on the books. People who came for a tent left with a novel, because the shelves stood between the door and the tool cupboard. Last year the library issued more books than in any year since 2013, and the average age of its readers fell by nineteen years.

The idea is spreading, though slowly. Halyna receives letters from librarians in other towns, and her answer is always the same: start with one object and a notebook, not with a plan and a budget. Her own difficulty now is space. The tents live in her office, the projector lives under her desk, and the town council has been discussing a second room since March.

Getting lost on purpose

Last spring I spent three days in a city I had never visited, and I decided to leave my phone at the hotel. Not switched off, just left behind. I wanted to find out 17.

The first morning was uncomfortable. I stood at a crossroads for a full minute, feeling that everyone could see 18. Then I asked a woman at a flower stall for directions to the river, and she drew a map on the back of a receipt.

By the afternoon I had six of these small paper maps in my pocket. Each of them was wrong in some detail, 19. I walked past a bakery twice, noticed it the second time, and ate the best pastry of the trip.

What surprised me most was how much I remembered afterwards. When you follow a blue dot, your attention goes to the screen, but when you navigate by a red roof and a bridge with green railings, 20.

I am not suggesting that anyone should throw their phone away. A map in your pocket is a wonderful thing 21. But for three days in an unfamiliar place, being slightly lost turned out to be the fastest way 22.

Why your phone knows the word you want

Predictive text feels like magic, but the idea behind it is old and fairly simple. A program looks at everything you have already typed and counts 23 often each word follows another. If the word ‘happy’ is followed by ‘birthday’ in nine messages out of ten, the keyboard offers ‘birthday’ before you have touched a single letter.

The system does not understand you. It has no idea 24 the birthday is, or whose. It works with frequency, and frequency is a surprisingly good guide to ordinary language, because most of what we write is ordinary.

Problems begin at the edges. Rare names, jokes and dialect words appear too seldom to be 25, so the keyboard replaces them with something more common, and the result can be embarrassing. Every language has its list of famous corrections that turned a normal sentence into nonsense.

Newer keyboards learn from you personally, which 26 the problem but does not remove it. They also raise a fair question about where that learning is stored. Most systems now keep the personal dictionary on the device itself, 27 than sending it to a company server.

The bus that came back

For twelve years there was no bus to the village. The route 28 in 2013, when the number of passengers fell below twelve a day, and people slowly got used to it. Those who had cars drove. Those who had none asked neighbours, waited by the road, or simply stayed at home.

Last autumn the service returned, and not because the council changed its mind. A group of residents 29 counting. For six weeks they wrote down every journey anyone in the village made: to the hospital, to the market, to school. The figure came to more than four hundred journeys a month, most of them by car with one person inside.

They took the notebook to the district office. ‘If we 30 them numbers, nothing would have happened,’ says Olha Kravets, who started the count. ‘Everyone knew we needed a bus. Nobody could prove it.’

The bus now runs three times a day. Twenty passengers a day is enough to keep it on the road, and the daily count 31 below that figure since November. Olha, 32 notebook now sits in the district archive, says the counting was the easy part.