Thirty Days of Free Tai Chi, Badger Talks and Custard Creams: My Library Leaflet Experiment

The rules (and the first mistake)

It started because I was early for a library reservation and had nothing to do but read the noticeboard. You know the one. The cork board by the foyer, layered with A5 flyers, torn tabs and one poster that has been there since roughly the Cretaceous period. I stood there for ten minutes and realised I had never actually been to any of the events advertised on it. So I decided to say yes to every free leaflet for a month. Not every event. Every leaflet. If it was pinned up and free, I was in.

My first mistake was assuming this would be a small commitment. My second mistake was not reading the small print on a flyer for 'Chair Yoga and Gentle Movement'. It was not the yoga that nearly finished me. It was the fact that it started at 7.30am and I had to park in a leisure centre car park that was still full of people who had clearly been awake for hours.

Week one: chair yoga, rhymetime and a bin talk

Monday brought the chair yoga. I was the youngest person there by about thirty years and the least flexible by a considerable margin. The instructor was kind and the biscuits afterwards were excellent. Tuesday brought Rhymetime at the library, which I attended without a child and spent most of the time pretending to be somebody's very late aunt. Wednesday was a talk on recycling bins that was somehow both too long and not long enough. I now know more about contaminated waste than I ever wanted to.

By Thursday I had done a local history walk, a ukulele singalong and a 'drop-in fire safety session' where a very patient man explained why I should not charge my phone under my pillow. On Friday I went to a board game night in the community room. I lost at Scrabble to a nine-year-old and a retired nurse. It was one of the best evenings I have had all year.

The best free night out involved a badger

The standout was a Tuesday talk called 'Badgers and Their Setts: A Local Mystery'. I went expecting to be the only person there. I was wrong. The room was full. There were slides. There were diagrams. There was a man in the front row who had brought his own badger photographs and was not afraid to share them. I learned that badgers are creatures of habit, that setts can be generations old and that a local wildlife group has been monitoring the same family for years. It was free, it was warm and it was unexpectedly gripping.

The second-best was a 'Sewing Circle and Repair Table' in a church hall. I brought a coat with a broken zip and left with a working zip and a new acquaintance called Margaret who tried to give me a jam jar. The third-best was a poetry open mic in the library itself, after hours, with folding chairs and a table of orange squash. A teenager read a poem about a bus. A man in his seventies read a poem about the same bus. Neither knew the other existed. It was brilliant.

The things I fled from (politely)

Not everything was a winner. I left a 'business networking breakfast' after eleven minutes because it was three men, a plate of custard creams and a very intense conversation about parking permits. I fled a two-hour talk on parish boundary maps when the speaker brought out a second projector. I walked out of a 'wellness and wellbeing evening' when we were asked to close our eyes and hum, mostly because I could not stop thinking about the bins talk and started to laugh.

I also learned that 'free' can still cost you your evening. A free event is not automatically good. A leaflet is not a review. But that is part of the point. You take a punt. You sit at the back. You leave if it is not for you. There is something quite liberating about attending something you have no real investment in, with no ticket to justify and no algorithm to blame.

Why the humble noticeboard still matters in 2026

We live in a world of personalised feeds and targeted ads, and yet the library noticeboard remains gloriously random. It does not know what I like. It does not care. It just pins up what is happening: a coffee morning, a knit-and-natter, a talk on badgers, a lost cat, a request for jam jars. It is the last algorithm-free feed in Britain, and it is stuck to a wall with drawing pins.

In a year when so much of local life has moved online, the noticeboard is still a genuinely useful public service. It is free to advertise on, free to attend and open to anyone who walks through the door. It gets you out of the house. It introduces you to people you would never otherwise meet. It is not glamorous. It is not curated. It is just there, quietly doing its job.

What I'm saying yes to next

My month is over, but I have not stopped checking the board. I have a flyer for a 'Beginner's Birdwatching Walk' on my fridge and a leaflet for a 'Community Choir Taster Session' in my bag. I will probably go to both. I might even bring biscuits.

The experiment taught me that free entertainment is not always easy to find, but it is usually closer than you think. It is in the library foyer. It is on the church hall noticeboard. It is pinned to the window of the corner shop. You just have to say yes to something you would normally walk past. And if it is terrible, you can always leave at half time and go home for a cup of tea. That is the beauty of a free leaflet. The stakes are low. The badgers are excellent.