Morning:
8°c
I read with interest that museums and galleries - along with KFC and Domino's Pizza - are enjoying a boom as a result of the recession. This suggests that our minds are sharpening even as our bodies and our bank balances atrophy. No bad thing.
My tip, though, is to sign up for the British Library - there's more to look at there than in any museum in the world, and unlike museums, it doesn't make your feet tired. The wireless is free, too - unlike at Starbucks or McDonald's, where you have to buy coffee.
When I renewed my Reader's Pass the other day, I walked away with a song in my heart. There is no public resource that offers such comfortable enticement to quiet scholarship. Its foyer and café are social spaces; its reading rooms - into which, like an aeroplane, you can bring nothing more threatening than a pencil - are places of airy calm. If I had my way, I'd scrap the Olympics and spend the money on something worthwhile, such as expanding the BL.
As well as being a fantastic resource, the library is a microcosm of London life. Its different reading rooms are like different areas of the city. Humanities One is the equivalent of Oxford Street; Rare Books more like the precincts of St Paul's Cathedral. It has its tourists, its grockle-hating curmudgeons, and in the privileged elite of readers who have permanent lockers, it has its own Millionaires' Row.
If you're a regular in any of these neighbourhoods you'll constantly bump into friends. Go, read, write, gossip and watch. Just don't count on getting much work done.
* Extraordinary. A team at Reading University claims to have been applying the theory of natural selection to the English language and reports that the word most likely to die out is "dirty". Followed by "guts", "throw" and "stick", all of which will be extinct within 750 years. All this proves is that applying the theory of natural selection to language is as much use as applying the scoring system of tennis to Yahtzee - and, perhaps, that some Darwinian mechanisms could usefully be applied to the faculty at Reading.
* To the French Ambassador's residence for the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, where all eyes were on the historian Andrew Roberts's guest for the evening: a striking-looking woman with blonde hair and a backless dress.
"It's Belle de Jour," one guest told me with absolute, nose-tapping confidence. Belle de Jour is the pseudonym under which a call-girl with a literary cast of mind wrote her memoirs.
It was not, in fact, Belle. It was the well-regarded historian Lisa Hilton. Whether she would have regarded the mistake as a compliment is anyone's guess. Another guest was halfway there.
"Do you know?" he told me, eyes bright with excitement. "Andrew Roberts has showed up with Paris Hilton's sister!"
Reader views (2)
The BL remains as relevant as it ever has, and on my frequent visits, I have been pleased to see staff have been taking serious steps in how to manage the ever growing Library population without compromising their inclusive policy - which, I add, should be applauded.
- Wolfgang, London, Uk, 04/03/2009 13:59
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The British Library reading rooms as a place to hang out - this is the logical conclusion of the new director's decision to issue readers' tickets for all, instead of maintaining it as a place of scholarship. Yes, it is harder to get work done as there are now snoozing undergrads taking up seats and others who don't know how to behave (eg: listening to iPods) in what was once the "world's leading centre for innovation, scholarship and research".
- Duncan, London, 01/03/2009 14:01
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