AS THE ESTEEMED Alan Coren once pointed out — possibly on this particular inch of newspaper, certainly in this typeface, but probably not while wearing this pleasant summer frock with the pink roses on the straps — the Dutch divide, by and large, into two categories. Round, red-faced, jolly Edams, and the tall, watery, more melancholic Goudas.

I’ve no idea which side of the dairy cabinet Jan Krol hails from — it’s possible he could be of mixed parentage; or one of the new breed of Dutch, with their liberalism, spreadability and chopped chives — but he’s certainly something mature, slightly blue and good with crackers. As chief librarian of Almelo public library in the Twente region of the Netherlands, Krol has introduced a scheme to “lend out”, for 45 minutes at a time, people from minority groups, to discover more about their lives. So far on the books are Gypsies, gay men, asylum-seekers, lesbians, non-criminal drug addicts, Muslims, the handicapped and someone living on benefits in poverty. Krol is looking to add Islamic women in full burka and people who are HIV-positive. All will be available, subject to other commitments, to discuss their lives and beliefs over a coffee in the library’s café.

Clearly this is the kind of eccentrically pleasing idea the Dutch excel in — other instances would be serving beer in pina colada glasses, and roguishly insisting that talking like Stanley Unwin should be an internationally recognised language. Convivial chit-chat is the antibiotic to bigotry’s urinary tract infection — although if you are suffering a genuine urinary tract infection, it is inadvisable to spend 45 minutes drinking coffee on a hard café chair with a Dutch homosexual in an Erasure T-shirt.

However, despite the undeniably laudable reasoning behind the scheme they should be calling “The Public Library, But In A Different Way To How One Usually Understands The Term” — or maybe just “LendyFriendy” — I do foresee a few small problems. The first is the matter of setting. Although a great deal of conversational headway can be made over a coffee, let’s face it — if you want a really good chat, what you really need is booze. Barrels and barrels of booze. In a perfectly logical world, this scheme would actually have been instigated by the landlord of Almelo’s biggest pub — under the slogan “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t got drunk and done karaoke with yet” — and would have been timed to coincide with happy hour.

Obviously the presence of alcohol does increase the risk of some rocket-fuelled fracas kicking off, but at least pubs have experience in separating two violently bickering people, both bellowing “Supplicant!” and “Poltroon!” If it all kicks off in the library café, on the other hand, the only security available is going to be a couple of anaemic humanities students, forced to dissuade the assailants by throwing biscotti at them from behind the milk-and-sugar station.

I do also fret over possible physical risk to the “lent” people. When Wolverhampton Central Library opened a toy library in the summer of 1986, it had to be closed down a mere four weeks later — a game of Operation was returned with a huge cornflake wedged in the appendix hole, and the “funny bone” had been eaten by a guinea-pig called Dustin Gee.

It’s the issue of sexual tension that I suspect may ultimately cause a few organisational shifts, however. As libraries are hot-spots of sexual tension — all that whispering! All that stern disapproval from the librarian! Really, only literary fairs and Icelandic fishing trawlers are more erotically pressurised — I do worry that this exercise in understanding may just degenerate into frenzied coupling in the café toilets, and people becoming “overdue” in a far more visceral way than having simply been expected back at 4.45pm.

Indeed, when I rang Jan Krol to ask him how the whole shebang was going — opening the conversation with the suitably Dutch greeting of “Hellolololo, it’s The Times dailyreadynewsypaper here” — he confirmed that sex may well be skewing the results of his admirable scheme; as, indeed, it has skewed almost every admirable scheme since the beginning of time.

“The most popular person to lend has been a Turkish gay guy,” Krol said, sounding amused. “He’s nice. Very good-looking. Young. He’s been on television a lot. We’ve had lots of reservations for him, from, erm, men.”

Times Recommends

• You created the job. You should do it
• A swindler with a ready maid plan
• Charming to pillory disabled Brown