Change and decay at the BL

I returned very late last night from a quick trip to the UK which was terrible in almost all respects. I had been invited to a book launch which I wanted to go to, and I thought why not combine that with a necessary trip to the BL to mop up some things which I didn't manage to track down on my quick trip to CUL recently. My aggravations fell into several categories:
a) Forlì airport! terrible buses, no taxis, awful lack of pavements, bus driver not prepared to stop at requested stop, etc etc. Nasty large half-dead beetle in the loos, possibly cockroach.
b) The British Library! All lockers in use; had to queue for ages for cloakroom only to be told that I had the wrong sort of bag for the cloakroom; spent further ages in locker room pouncing embarrassingly on anyone who looked like they were leaving. BL refused to renew my reader's pass with only a passport and a letter of recommendation. Had to get parents to send a registered letter packed with various utility bills to the house of the friend I was staying at. Place rammed with students engaging in social discourse.
c) The British Library again! The next day I managed to get in to the reading rooms, which took ages because the pass issuing place was full of students who are now automatically allowed a reader's pass. Humanities 1 had become full by a quarter to eleven, and the people at the door would only allow me in when I promised I was just consulting open access stuff not hoping to sit and work. There was a higher proportion of undergraduates there than I am used to encountering in the UL. Tons of desks had been left as marked territory while the reader was actually elsewhere, as is the wont of students, and the staff had their hands full telling people off for using highlighters and biros let alone doing anything to do with actual books. (Only pencils are allowed anywhere in the BL now.) Other students sat at their desks texting or conducting low conversations with friends. This is all very well, if still annoying, in a university library, but the BL is not a Higher Education establishment. The manuscripts room was in a terrible state. Ordered things took forever to come because of the pressures of the extra use. I got very little done of what I needed and managed no more than twenty minutes with my manuscript. The staff were frazzled and a tad bad-tempered, if still essentially helpful. At my group of 8 desks there were three students -- in the manuscripts reading room! And when I was issued with my MS, a Special which should only be viewed at certain desks, I couldn't be put at one of those desks because they were all full. (Users in this reserved area included a boy using a biro! I told the staff on him. Really, using a biro at the Special and Illuminated manuscripts desks!) I actually wrote a complaining e-mail to the BL; I don't usually complain about things because it takes up valuable time which I could otherwise spend getting over them, but I felt that the threat to manuscript conservation practices and to the staff's well-being demanded some sort of response.
d) Yet again the British Library! I had a very nice coffee with a friend who works there. Although he generally has a good attitude of laughing at rather than getting wound up by the BL's problems, even he was pretty despairing. There is no longer a curator on duty in the manuscripts reading room! It would be an exaggeration to say that this is the beginning of the end of civilisation, but how much of an exaggeration? I'm not going to blog about it because I find it genuinely alarming and upsetting. Please just believe me that this is a threat to manuscript scholarship.
e) Ryanair again! Terrible much-delayed flight back to god-forsaken Forlì surrounded by Italian schoolkids and, what is worse, their screeching teacher, who sat in the seat next to me alternately yelling at her students to stop doing things and trying to start up school-related chants.

But on the plus side I had a wonderful evening between b) and c). First I went to this book launch, which was the best sort of civilised affair. It was in the Great Hall at Lambeth Palace Library. The archbish. was there -- go archbish.! -- as well as lots of nice friendly people whom I was glad to catch up with. There were manuscripts on display, and the author, who is one of the scholars for whom I have the most respect, gave a good and funny speech. I bumped into the head of BL publications, whom I know from when I worked in the BL MSS dept, and he thanked me for having given a positive review to a book they'd recently done. This disconcerted me quite a lot, because I always think of reviews as existing in a sort of vacuum unrelated to people. I have a policy of not agreeing to review anything for which I don't have more positive to say than negative, but I also feel like you have to say something negative in a review, given that nothing and no one is perfect but God. I was racking my brains to remember what negative thing I had come up with about that excellent book when luckily the publisher mentioned it himself. I turned the subject to whether he thought they could do similar books on related subjects; I suggested one on Caroline minuscule (not just English) and he looked all thoughtful and said someone else had suggested that too. Which is excellent because that is a book I would like, maybe need, to read.

Then I skillfully cut out of the herd an old undergraduate friend and got him to join some of us back at the friend's house where I was staying, and four of us had a curry together with good conversation and an unexpected starter of foie gras served Mexican-style on toasted tortilla wraps.

At the BL I also bumped into an old friend who gave me news of at least one positive BL happening. He's managed to set up a prize for poetry pamphlets, specifically to encourage small presses and starting-out poets who publish in unpretentious little pamphlets rather than shiny slim volumes with Bloodaxe. (Nothing wrong with Bloodaxe, btw.) That seems cool to me. Though he did say that you have to couch everything in the right terms there now; telling the people from the fourth floor (the fourth floor is where the managers live) that you want to talk to poets gets a bad reaction, so you have to say that you want to engage with the creative industries. The idea of poetry as a creative industry seems quite funny to me, given how very financially poor it is. Alas British Library! I feel like Jesus quoting Psalms about enfolding her under his wings like a hen with chicks when he arrived at Jerusalem, not that I have any delusions of grandeur or anything. It's painful to see this great institution going astray. Is knowledge and scholarship supposed to be confined to universities now? Among other things, that will be very bad for academia's already unhealthy ego.

So, in brief: a trip ruined by books and libraries and redeemed by social encounters. Which really doesn't sound like me.