Of course it had to happen. Plans are afoot to turn four of my local libraries – including Torridon Road, the one whose shelves I stripped over the course of countless Saturdays during my pathologically antisocial and extremely happy childhood – into (partly) community-run entities in order to save £1m. It’s part of the £45m of savings that Lewisham – the country’s 17th most deprived borough – has to find from somewhere as a result of the government’s continuing commitment to taking from the poor to give to the rich.

So, for the first time ever, I went to a public meeting. The room was packed. Full of local people who had come to remonstrate, to share their memories, to testify to their children’s and grandchildren’s dependence on the libraries, to talk about the vulnerable people who depend on the services – and the company they find there sometimes, the simple warmth and shelter of the buildings that keep them from being set adrift from the community entirely. Those people, of course, rarely have the physical, emotional or financial resources to get to public meetings. But they are out there, their need, alas, matched only by their powerlessness.

I spent a day in Torridon Road last year, to write an article about a new library report, and saw the truth of all the testimony. But for the sake of £1m, it’s going to go. The council and libraries’ representatives – the poor bloody infantry, not the enemy – did their best to reassure people that the impact of the changes would be minimised, but the hard fact is that once you start taking away trained staff, once you start relying on volunteers to look after things and renting space in the building to other companies (no matter how “complementary” they are to the setting at first), it is the beginning of the end. The notion of libraries as special is lost. A sacred, silent space free to all is lost, and with it the implicit promise that the life of the mind – the life of any mind, of your mind – is important disappears into the ether. Things begin to fragment, and the people whose lives are already chaotic get lost too. And none of it comes back. For a million pounds, these things will go, forever. I don’t suppose the House of Lords can step in on this one. But the fight, by people who have less to fight with than most, goes on.

Who’s the walking dead?

There has been a lot of ink and pixels expended over the years on the meaning of zombies. Are they a metaphor for an era’s anxieties? (Communists are after us! No, homosexuals! No, immigrants!) Our embodied fear of disease and decay? Or perhaps our innate hatred of the Other, or the eternal fear of invasion? Maybe once. But watching the new series of The Walking Dead, it occurs to me that now all our anxieties are given voice on social media and our worst fears seem realised daily on the news, zombies just mean a bit of rest. Only personal survival to worry about? No internecine geopolitical complexities to work out? No global warming? Just all zombies, all the time? The Walking Dead is 2015’s answer to The Good Life. Apocalyptic is the new bucolic. Aaaand relax …

Oxford’s homeopathic beat

Great. Psychologists at Oxford University have shown that dancing in sync with other people is basically the best way on earth for us to feel joyful and connect with each other.

Coupla things, here: one, this is another study that only helps crystallise the vague feeling that psychology is the homeopathy of mental sciences. And two, how does it help those of us whom the rhythm is never going to get? Those of us who dance like tumours need research into the means of enabling us to move to the beat. Get on it, Oxford. Get on it.