People watching
As you will have seen in my previous broadcast, I am partial to a bit of over thinking. This not-working lifestyle is all well and good but it’s solitary and indulgent. Write life purpose: tick. Write a personal vision statement: tick. Write some two-year life goals: tick. Turn your life into a cliched project management exercise and suck all the fun out of living:big tick.
But I started so I shall finish. And finishing means defining some projects, actions and then get on with life. And so I’ve come back to the British Library to chivvy myself along, forgetting (did I really?) how unbelievably distracting it is. Perhaps it merely represents how distracting life is. Yes, fine, one can plan and focus and be ruthless with time if you want to be “successful”. But you need also to blinker yourself from the world’s near-constant barrage of new, interesting, unbelievable and nearly always hilarious sidetracks. Your loss.
People-watchers should get themselves a readers pass because the variety of species that inhabit these famous reading rooms need to be seen, and sat with for a while, to be fully appreciated. There are various groups of people. First, the young and keen researchers: the majority seem to be female. They see the Agatha Christie types all around them and over-react against the fear of becoming one of them by dressing as if they have the lead part in a Hoxton satire (forthcoming: trenchantly productions). Italian glasses, flowing dresses, pierced everything. But they can’t fight the fact they are going to spend ten years learning about dead people or categorising a new type of worm. The gradations of metamorphosis from here to Agatha are all in attendance. The aggressively clipped peroxide locks will slowly turn into a long ponytail through the sedimentary layers of forgotten preening that are fully evident (see below).
Get trenchantly’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Next the foreign visitor with little time to waste. Asian usually. Briefcase. Seen mainly in Manuscripts, Maps and Science. At least one laptop. They jetted in, they need some incredibly important piece of information only they know exists. There at opening time to closing time. No chat. They will be very rich one day and you will have no idea what they did here. They cover their material and guard it closely.
The retired and bored. Mainly women, again. They shimmy about with floral notebooks, elaborate sets of pencils and are often taking tea in the cafe. Probably researching their extensive family history/illness/anything to do with crockery. Well-educated and fully aware they are in the twilight years of potential mental atrophy and as such buy ever more perching glasses (replete with a string around their neck to cope with the rapid near-sight — long-sight situation when scanning the newly found nugget of information about Lord Faltermeyer III and trying to ensure Mabel Entwistle on the other side of the room hasn’t seen her with the Somerset Who’s Who of 1892 lest she shuffle over and swipe it for the selfish extension of her genogram) and a shopping bag that leaves you with no doubt they are Liberal Democrat.
And finally the ancient, completely-nuts-spent-all-their-life-here. Mainly men. Imagine sitting in the same room everyday, in silence, for thirty years. This is the result. If they managed to get over the disgust of being evicted from the British Museum reading room when Lord Foster optically-raped the Great Court; they have since suffered the indignity of sitting under fluorescent lights, a fact that is never absent of mind. A typical example is the man opposite me who just put down a pile of dusty leather-bound books, and is shaking (literally — geddit?) with excitement of the potential treasures within. This group has complete disregard for anyone else when they cough for ten minutes, arrange their medicine or mutter darkly when told they must use the electronic book request system. They redefine “academic”. They nearly all have white hair, glasses, dress with a jacket borrowed from Michael Foot’s extensive collection.
People aside there is then the sheer mass of information to keep you from your chosen path of “achievement”. It’s somehow more daunting than the internet (orders of magnitude larger) when staring at you. Take the room I am in, Humanities (yes, it’s still funny to ask where Human Ties room is): There is a wall, twice as wide as my house, with beautifully bound volumes of the Dictionary Catalog of the Research Libraries 1911 to 1971. Volume 693 is of the New York Public Library containing entries from Storh to Straus D. Page 185 column 3 contains the index card for Stott, Verney (1890-) for his book Volumetric Glassware published in 1928. It’s item 406405A (section PKV) if you ever happen to be in Manhattan and want to read it. Each page has 28 of these. Each volume is 600 pages long and there are over 1000 of these books. And this is one of about 100 sets of these indexes in this one room, a room where 90% of the space is for tables and chairs. And there are 10 of these reading rooms. If you are still not freaking out, in the basements below are where the 14 million physical books are, and there is another two sites in the UK somewhere for the other 40 million items.
Enough. I need to get a job, or, whatever.
