WE'RE not using our public libraries as much as we used to do, according to a report from campaign group Libri.

It can't be because, as a nation, we've stopped reading, and I say this as the wife of someone who runs charity second-hand bookstalls as a hobby. Maybe Libri's claim that libraries should stock a broader range of books and have more accommodating opening hours is true because, from behind the stall, I know the readers are there.

That hobby has its perks for a bookaholic like me. As we sorted our latest "gift box" of some kind soul's discards, I bought an omnibus edition of E M Delafield's four volumes of the Provincial Lady's diary before it hit the next stall.

If you haven't met the Provincial Lady - she has no name - she's a close relative of Mrs Miniver, with a similarly fascinating perspective on a long-gone way of life. Most of it takes place in that magic country called Before the War, of which my generation's parents spoke so nostalgically; a country where there were greengrocers and fishmongers who called, postmen who came several times a day - and a code of social behaviour so rigid it's a wonder anyone dared step outside their front door.

Just how rigid I discovered because, coincidentally, in a pile of ephemera I found a copy of the 1938 My Home book of etiquette and entertaining "by Lady Troubridge" and, by gum, did she know what was what.

My Home doesn't sound like a terribly upmarket women's magazine but it thought its readers were of the type to leave visiting cards if they called on a new neighbour, who happened to be out. A woman should leave one of her own cards and two of her husband's for a married couple; one of each for a single lady or widow; two of her own and two of her husband's for two sisters living together. If, however, the new neighbour was a bachelor, her husband must be the one to call. And don't forget to turn down the corner of your card to show you called in person, and didn't just send your maid with it, will you?

If you think that's exhausting, just be grateful that, when our offspring get married, all we're required to do is carry out the couple's instructions and pay up for doing it. From the engagement, when the girl's mother's first duty is to send an invitation to tea to the young man's parents, to the bride's departure on honeymoon, there is a right way for everything, including a "note to the bride's mother: don't carry a bouquet ... that is no longer the mode". And it's assumed the bride's father will "do his financial best for his girl's future" as well as pay up for the wedding breakfast, church flowers, cars - and the bride's trousseau!

Poor Lady Troubridge. In a year or so, it would all end in a flurry of evacuees and gas masks. Lucky us in our less formal world, except that, codeless, we sometimes have to guess what ought to be what and, inevitably, upset someone.