Good luck, fellow voters

All being well, I will be in the library tomorrow while most people are voting.

I have already voted by post. Yes, I have decided to trust the system, although after listening to Brits working in places like Australia, the US and Greece complaining that their postal or proxy votes have gone astray, I can only hope the 'new' government in Westminster will add voting by internet to my growing list of things that need to be done in the UK: a new constitution would be good, maybe a federal one with the right of secession built in for any country that wants to leave; voting for 17 and 18-year-olds; a move from first-past-the-post to the single-transferable-vote, which would give us a more representative parliament. I won't go on. You get the picture.

A and I will be picking books off the shelves for our wee group of mainly elderly people. We do home deliveries for them from the library. They will have voted, like me, by post.

The library will be busy: in the big room over on the left, there will be a couple of largish groups of asylum-seekers and people who have earned the 'right to remain.' They learn English at courses set up by Glasgow Libraries and paid for by the Scottish Government to help people settle here. On the right, there will be a full house of people working away at computers: some are EU migrant workers, keeping in touch with family and friends - and no doubt responsibilities - back home; others are local people carrying out job searches for the Job Centre. There may be a group of kids in from a local nursery or primary school. There may be a MacMillan support group for cancer patients meeting across the corridor. There will also be a steady stream of borrowers coming through the front door.

Most of these visitors don't have a vote in the UK. A lot of them are going to be kicked out when Brexit kicks in.

The woman in charge, K, and her staff, are good with them all.

It's friendly place. When Glasgow City invested a lot of money in having the library re-vamped, they arranged for a master craftsman to come in and restore ceilings and cornicing to how they had looked when it was first built. Pretty fantastic, eh? The original Edwardian colours are superb. I was pleased to be able to talk to the craftsman who did the work. He was a quiet, shy, middle-aged man who beamed when I looked at the restored gold leaf and said out loud 'O, my gawd! This is how it looked when I was wee!'

When I was taking these photos, I had a few conversations with people using the library. They wanted to know what I was photographing. When I explained, it was clear they had no idea of the history. I was pleased to tell them I first came here, I reckon, when I was six. My father was doing a course in engineering at what is now Strathclyde University (the Anderson, he called it) and I came along with him on the tram every week from Copland Road to keep him company.

Elder Park Library opened on 5 September 1903. It was gifted to the people of Govan from Mrs Isabella Elder and sits in the park she also gifted and dedicated to her shipbuilder husband John. It was opened by Andrew Carnegie, the Scots-American industrialist and millionaire.

If I'm honest, I would say: Yes, I'm pleased these philanthropists put their hand in their pocket at the time (Carnegie didn't often do that). That kind of benevolence was at the heart of Scottish education for a long time.

But I don't want public services in the 21st century to depend on hand-outs.

The UK is the 6th richest country in the world and we should be able to fund public services ourselves. We pay enough taxes surely. If our business and industry aren't productive (as was certainly the case in the second half of the 20th century), we need to look at them again and make them work for us all - not just close them down or sell them off.

So however you vote on Thursday, think on that. Can we make things better? Yes, we can.