THIS has been a momentous week, and I am not talking about Queen’s Speeches or £6 billion Government spending cuts. I am talking about the re-opening of York Central Library.

It has been a bleak winter for bookworms like myself. First I was deprived of leisurely rambles through the bookshelves in Museum Street, then Borders closed down and I lost the chance to buy the books I couldn’t borrow from the library.

I don’t know how I survived all the snow and cold weather without the opportunity to curl up in front of a roaring fire with a good book. Finally some bureaucrat who probably spends his spare time perusing catalogues of 18th century Mongolian coins decided this winter of deprivation would be the ideal time to close the Yorkshire Museum for renovation. York’s Cultural Quarter has been decimated.

But at last the end is in sight and York’s cultural life is looking up. The library is open again and as soon as I finish typing this, I’m popping down to Museum Street for a coffee.

Yes, a coffee. I have become a regular visitor to Acomb library since it became an Explore centre and opened its café. The weekly household shopping is much more bearable when you can combine it with a leisurely coffee and a browse through newspapers or a book.

Families bring their children in for elevenses or afternoon snacks and old age pensioners use it as a chance to meet friends and chat.

There are those who long for the days when libraries were a hushed place of scholarly study in the middle of a mile-wide coffee and tea exclusion zone in case the hot liquids spilt on the books, but not me. I like my libraries to be bustling focal places for their community, not a books-only backwater. The child wolfing down a cheese scone in the café will sooner or later cotton on to the idea that the books he sees on the other side of the room are interesting, and once he does that, his school marks will shoot up.

So down with the elderly gentlemen complaining about children running among the bookshelves – but a word to the brats’ parents about the need for their offspring to respect other people’s right for a quiet read.

York Explore has opened just in time. The spending cuts are here and there is worse, far worse, to come. As the austerity measures bite and life gets tougher, our need for the library will increase. Without culture, we are just animals obsessed with the need to find food and eat it.

Theatres, sports facilities and concert halls charge entrance fees. But libraries are free. A good book gives us the chance to escape for a while the troubles of making the pennies stretch further.

The thousands and thousands who will lose their jobs in the coming months and years will need a place where they can gain, for free, the knowledge that could give them a new career.

Yorkshire Museum, when it reopens, will remind us that bad as today’s times are, at least no-one like Eric Blood-Axe is on the ram-page or burning down the city. We will need hope in the months to come and York Explore and Yorkshire Museum can give us that.

I just wish the accountants in the Guildhall and the Treasury will appreciate that and not start imposing entrance fees, or worse, close them down, in the national interest of reducing the budget deficit.

Let the banks and the plutocrats pay for our libraries and museums – they got us into this mess. Now where did I put that bagful of books I borrowed from York Central Library back in October before it closed?