In an attempt to impose a routine on my chaotic existence and get a steady quota of reading and writing done, I have taken to commuting to libraries every day. It’s important that the library hasn’t got a free wireless Internet service, otherwise I’d just be idly emailing and web-surfing my days away like I’ve been doing at home for so long. So the new plan is to get up at about 7 and go straight to the institution of choice, as soon as it opens. I divide the day into periods of ‘work’ and breaks. So I now enjoy the discipline of having a job, without the troublesome business of actually having a job. The larger public libraries of London are my office.
I’m a British Library card holder, but though I enjoy the current St Pancras building (when I have reason to use their collections), I far prefer to sit in its ghost-ridden former venue, the fantastic Reading Room of the British Museum. With its leather book rests and pen-hooks, glorious domed roof, and 99.9% perfect circular structure (4 cm off, I learn), it’s a fitting working environment for a penniless aesthete.
I’d also love to use that Groucho Club of libraries, The London Library in Piccadilly; but alas their membership remains beyond my means at £195 a year. It’s on my To Do list when I have the money. If I ever have the money.
The BM’s Reading Room is now the Museum’s public reference library. Anyone can wander in without registration or membership of any kind and sit down at one of the famous desks. There are rules to observe: be quiet, no eating or drinking, no photography, no mobile phones, don’t leave your bag unattended. Standard stuff, you’d have thought. Yet there are one or two absolute idiots who happily make calls on their mobiles here – without even whispering. Still, the place isn’t that much louder than the crowded Humanities rooms of the British Library proper.
I do wonder how some people can think a public library is a place to use their mobile phone, and glower to the point of threatening violence when they’re politely asked to desist. Is there no act more shockingly arrogant and uncaring of one’s fellow man in the field of modern etiquette? To not switch off your phone as you enter a library just beggars belief.
I did once hear of some kind of technological solution which broadcasts a mobile blocking signal across the building. If such a divine box of tricks exists, it must be installed at every library immediately.
