Diary

18 April 2009

Catherine Blyth opens her diary

The British Library has taught me plenty. Least welcome is the discovery that I’m a bigot. I hate undergraduates. In particular, chatty undergraduates who mumble into mobiles and hum to iPods while their free hands wander over other firm young student bodies. Detect any jealousy? Yes, I mind being prejudiced less than what it implies. Namely, I’m middle-aged. But greater issues are at stake. The BL is cool with the kids. This cultural disaster has spawned a new malaise: library rage. Until 2004 undergraduates weren’t admitted. Then management relaxed the admission criteria without enlarging facilities. Now readers travelling from afar, or fitting research around jobs or child care, must compete with teenagers from neighbourhood halls of residence, for whom the BL is more convenient than their university libraries. As a result, arrive after 10.30 a.m. and you’ll struggle to find a desk. This doesn’t trouble BL characters like the Lear with a Karl Marx beard who perambulates the reading rooms, trailing vapours eloquent of serious commitment to the Great Unwashed. But until UCL and the LSE admit the likes of me, I’ll feel discriminated against. Meanwhile, the BL cloakroom resounds with academics cursing students as they hunt in vain for a locker. Louder cries echo from the unemployed, who flock for the free internet. A pin-striped man silenced the café. ‘These prices in a recession?’ he railed, brandishing his FT at a worker whose hourly rate probably offers little change from a fairy cake. ‘Think of the young people.’ Judging by their MacBooks, the kids can afford it.

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