Three-part drama

I am just writing a few words because I wanted to tell you that I am composing today’s entry  from Cambridge University Library, where I am splendidly seated at a huge ancient oak table surrounded by just about every book in the known universe.

I am supposed to be working, so I am not going to write much, but I just thought that it would be good to let you see it.

You can’t really see it. It would be terribly proletarian to take pictures, but I can describe it to you.

The place is enormous. It would make a perfect location for filming poor Winston Smith going about his daily miseries  at the Ministry of Love, it has that closed, slightly sinister air about it. My friend Amanda thinks the place looks like a cross between a disused power station and a crematorium, and she is right, but once you come inside it is the most astonishing maze of book-lined corridors. Books are, we are told, arranged in size order, and if you want one you simply put its title into your computer and it tells you on which shelf, whereabouts in the library, it can be found.

Sometimes you might have to walk ten or fifteen miles until you get to it.

It is a dizzying experience, and I am both thrilled and dizzied in equal quantities. I think I have never in my life seen so many books in one place before, even Waterstones in Manchester has not got a leg to stand on in comparison. We have had a cup of coffee in the tea room, and it has a large bookshelf filled only with books which have been written by other tea room customers. There are lots of names on there that I recognise, Kate Atkinson and Richard Osman and dozens of others.

I am going to get on with my own writing, or I will never have anything on the tea room shelves.

This is a second update. It is six o’clock, and I am going to go out for the evening. I have actually, really, truly, spent the whole day writing, apart from a few brief interludes for making cheese sandwiches and cups of tea. Honestly, the world could not be a finer place at the moment.

I have changed into my slightly smarter clothes for the event, which is called Formal Hall, and basically means that you have got to go to dinner disguised as Batman. I have showered and washed my hair, and have been trying to dry it on the radiator without much success, so hopefully it will air out in the evening air on my bicycle, because it is not the Lucy Cavendish Formal Hall, but the one at Wolfson, where Amanda belongs. We are going to go and drink wine and giggle.

It is quite astonishing what a difference it makes to one’s air of gravitas to be garbed as Professor Snape from Harry Potter. The presence of a peculiar black cloak with holes cut in for sticking your hands out makes even an impoverished northern taxi driver look a bit intellectual. Not very intellectual, I might add, I still look like the sort of person who might wander around a library gawping and looking hopelessly lost, but it is an improvement.

It is now Part Three, and very much later. I am back in my little cloistered cell, after a truly marvellous evening.

It was a properly Cambridge evening, everybody in gowns and evening wear, seated at round tables, being served by discreet chaps in waistcoats and white gloves. Honestly, there were so many glasses on the table there was hardly room for the dinner, which was truly, splendidly superb. There was paté with pomegranate seeds, beef that you could have cut with a spoon, and a dish of something which tasted like lemon-flavoured cream, which was quite one of the nicest puddings I have ever had. Cambridge does good food. There was white wine with the starter, red wine with the dinner, some syrupy stuff with the pudding, and port afterwards. Probably I shouldn’t have ridden my bicycle back, but I did.

We sat at a table full of young people, a couple of aspirant doctors, an excitable Japanese neurologist, an Italian lady studying Korean language and culture, and a French chap studying something scientific, although I forget what it was. Oddly enough, it was such an interesting company that we couldn’t bear to end the evening. We talked and talked until everybody else had gone home, and the staff were starting to clear the tables, after which we sadly went our separate ways. Probably I will never see any of them again, but for those few hours it was a joy to listen and to talk. They were young and funny and hopeful and clever.

I will not mind handing the world over to them when the time comes.

The future is a lot brighter than I had thought.