… last night as I was pulling up outside the Library at Cambridge University.
Today, I was battling, and battling unsuccessfully as you might expect, with one of the most classic examples of incestuous Academia that you would ever have the misfortune to meet.
There’s a really big car park at the University Library, as I knew. What I didn’t know is that it’s locked during closing hours. Parking in the street outside is controlled during working hours, but it’s a nice wide verge with plenty of free spaces and in a quiet area.
The plan would be therefore that I would park up for the night outside in the street, wake up really early, and be queueing in Caliburn at the gate to the car park when they came to unlock it.
Here’s Strawberry Moose queueing up to enter the library.
He was quite keen to teach a couple of courses at the University until I explained to him that the word is Lecturers, not Lechers.
Rather like the time that he tried to charter a plane to come home from Canada – but changed his mind when they told him that it was spelt L-E-A-Rjet.
So in I walked to the University library.
And I had a reason to be here too. Someone in Pionsat had heard of a story that an Eton teacher by the name of William Johnson Cory had visited the Auvergne and made a reference to the Chateau de Pionsat in one of his letters.
Before setting out, I had done some research into the aforementioned and discovered that on his death in 1892 he had bequeathed his letters to the Cambridge University library.
So here I had come to read them.
But I was failing to take into account the incestuous nature of Academia at the UK’s top-drawer University.
Yes, his papers are here. But no, I can’t see them.
“Why not?”
“Are you from the University?”
“No I’m not”
“Well, you need to have a letter from someone connected with the University validating your research project”
“But I’ve just come from France – I don’t know anyone here.”
“Well we can’t let you consult our papers until a researcher connected with our own University has had the opportunity to examine them”
“You mean that no-one from the University has examined them yet?”
“That’s right”
“And they’ve been here since 1892?”
“Yes”.
No wonder that mainstream Academia has such a poor reputation when the Universities are prepared to sit upon piles of unrecorded papers until the cows come home rather than let researchers from outside their own sphere of control have a peek.
Who knows WHAT treasures these Universities might be sitting on? When you read in some of these journals things like “a rare 7th-Century poem by Caedmon has just been discovered in an Oxbridge Library” you can understand why, now.
But I had nothing better to do and nowhere else to go, so I raided the University library just the same, seeing as I was in.
And here I hit the jackpot.
On the shelves was an original version of all of the volumes of Sir Walter Raleigh (not him, the other one)’s The War in the Air
This was the book commissioned by the British Government as the Official History of the Royal Flying Corps (later the RAF) from its inception until the end of World War i.
I’ve been trying to find a copy of all of the volumes but the only ones that I have ever seen have had their maps and photograph plates removed, and the books are of much less interest without those.
But here I was in my element.
Later that evening I went for a drive to the outskirts of town where I cooked a meal (not practical to do that in the street right outside the Library) in a layby.
Having eaten, I then went on to a Motorway Service Area on the M10 – quite a drive and after all of that, the internet was down.
So I came back to my my spec outside the Library and had an early night.
