Beautiful Books

Fluttering butterfly-like books suspended in display cases as though caught in time, islanded eerily in the dark: an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Designing English, about the use of manuscripts and text in medieval England. Ms T wondered whether I wanted to see it, and I went to Oxford to do so, giving me the chance to have lunch with her and Dr Bones (who is now a psychologist, having added a MPhil to her doctorates in zoology and neuroscience) and thus save a couple of stamps writing to them both. The show was fun, although Ms T objected to the over-familiar style of the captions, preferring something a little more stern. You can squint through the glass, trying to discern the odd word of medieval English, occasionally caught out by the odd gruesome or weird illustration. 

I came back to the new café in the Weston Library (be not deceived - this is but part of the Bodleian) in the afternoon for tea with my accidental god-daughter Kaitlin, who is in her second term at Brasenose college. I'm her accidental godfather because when she was christened at Lamford there wasn't anyone available so I and Il Rettore both stood in. The last time I actually saw her, as opposed to corresponding, was at my induction at Swanvale Halt when she was 10. She is now of course 18 and a gangly young woman with big round glasses studying Classics & Sanskrit. I asked whether she was involved with anything extra-curricular: she was worrying about not having time to keep up learning Russian and Chinese, she answered. She has slipped very easily into Oxford which is nice: I am a bit ambiguous about it these days, but Kaitlin maintains that most of the university regards the management students and the denizens of the Said Business School with some disdain, so perhaps it isn't all as commercially-driven as I fear.  

Lovely as it was to see people, in fact I was there primarily to plunge through the subterranean corridor that leads from the Old Bod to the Gladstone Link and read books about 18th-century landscape gardening. Kaitlin likes working in the Gladstone Link because you have to sit at desks facing a blank white wall and there are no distractions. I must confess that as I stride down that underground corridor with my footsteps echoing around the lino and steel I can't help calling to mind the beginning of The Prisoner.