A blonde walked into a library and said, “Can I have a burger and chips?” The librarian said, “Sorry, this is a library.” So the blonde whispered, “Can I have a burger and chips?”

It’s true: libraries are to become raucous gaming arcades filled with fast food and people screaming on mobile phones. This inspired plan has been hatched by the Association of Chief Librarians, in a suicidal effort for more borrowers that will destroy libraries as sanctuaries for the mind.

This “diversification” of public libraries away from books into computers and cupcakes is simply wrong. That is not a library. That is an EasyInternet café. Giving people what they have elsewhere is not going to bring in lost book borrowers. The attempt at popularisation shows a lack of imagination from those who are supposed to be the last guardians of the imagination. Stick libraries in the soon-to-be-bankrupt high-street shops with the neon sign “Free Book Rentals” and crowds will come. March primary school children to the library once a fortnight for one book. Give kids the space and silence to be bored until they are inspired, and take out the intravenous computer drip.

The assumptions a) that people will starve in libraries and b) that silence is scary and c) that it’s OK to spill Red Bull on literature are quite unfounded. The British Library, where I’m working on a novel, is increasingly packed with students and ordinary people researching, to the extent that Lady Antonia Fraser had a hissy fit when she could not get a seat last summer.

The rot is about to start later this year in Camden, where I take my kids to Swiss Cottage Library. We feel no need to drip ice lollies as we browse - the library has a perfectly good café. What libraries should be doing is showcasing the living word as much as the dead word. The boom in literary festivals is a sign that readers want their poets and authors live and kicking, and most will talk for nothing more than a bus fare and a glass of warm white wine. I should know.

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