You just kinda wasted my precious time

Much though I love Dylan, my dedication to advertising his verse extends no further than having the lyrics to Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues on the wall behind my desk. Rather greater enthusiasm, though, from some people at the top of Denmark Hill where I usually get off the bus to get the train on my way to work: from a first-floor window this morning hung a sheet with words written on it, possibly in spraypaint.

Usually on Denmark Hill this indicates a protest banner of some sort, generally against the decanting of council tenants from their estates against their will and without their consent: but when crossed the road to get a better view of the slogan, it turned out to be a couplet from It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.

Rather literal, I thought - Dylan being the most allusive of poets - being painted on a sheet and all, though a witty enough choice at the same time. Dylan must be on a lot of people's minds at the moment as a result of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home being on the television over two nights last week, having at the very least the effect of reminding the viewer how great he was when he was really great. But he'd been on my mind already, as a result, the previous week, of having had to attend an awayday at a Kensington hotel with all the library staff: teambuilding, presentations, overuse of the word challenges, the usual drill.

This would normally be sufficient on its own to recall several of the verses to Maggie's Farm, even had the various conference rooms not been named after great American musicians (Jimi Hendrix was another one) and our meeting held in somewhere inexplicably entitled, I believe, the Dylan Foyer. I had the whole morning to switch off and select for myself the line from Dylan most appropriate to the exercise.