I popped into the British Library to renew my reading card. It's nearly six years since I got it (it's needed replacing since the start of the year) and I can't believe that all that time has gone by. But the difference on the photos on the two cards gives a fair representation of the passage of time.
I didn't, however, go and do any work. It seems like this is pretty much going to be a week off, which isn't such a bad thing. I turned my computer on in the cafe, but only played patience and then went to look round the brilliant exhibition of national treasures.
I did this a few months ago, so forgive me if I wrote about it then (can't find it anywhere), but there is some amazing stuff on display. To think I wrote a book about cocks only a few metres away from one of the original copies of the Magna Carta and manuscripts including Shakespeare's hand-writing, Captain Scott's diary and the original lyrics of Yesterday is quite astounding. Perhaps one day, the original manuscript of Talking Cock will take its rightful place alongside these literary treasures (they could chuck out one of the old Bibles or something).
There is something magical and exhilarating about being inches away from these incredible and historic documents. Both the historian and the writer in me were chidlishly excited. Queen Elizabeth I wrote that one! Tess of the D'urbervilles was originally called "A Daughter of the D'Urbervilles" until Hardy crossed it out and corrected it like he was taking part in some Monty Python sketch! Wasn't Thomas More's handwriting neat? Wasn't Sylvia Plath's handwriting like that of a child? Don't the Beatles lyrics seem rather basic when placed amongst the greatest examples of British literature? How cute and yet unpleasant that Lennon wrote the lyrics to one of his songs on the back of his son's first birthday card!
The exhibition is breath-taking and brilliant and free. You can see the fucking Magna Carta - I now there were a few of them and this one is in bad condition, but it's the only one with the seal still attached, looking squashed and faded, but so would you after nearly eight hundred years.
And seeing the handwriting of famous writers does somehow bring you closer to them than just reading the printed word. The computer age has perhaps destroyed this as a future pleasure. It's actually hard to fathom that Hardy wrote his book by hand, in a big note-book, making corrections by hand.
I was aware that I was not only connected to the great men and women of the past by seeing things that they had actually touched, but also connected to the people in the future, who will still be looking at all these things in hundreds of years time. Disasters and ward aside these items will be kept for as long as people are capable of caring for them (or until some other regime takes over our country and decides to destroy the vestiges of the past), and great people as yet unborn will stare in wonder at the works of the great people who are long dead.
I am delighted to have a library card for this amazing institution, even if I only use this privilege to mainly write about genitalia.
