Full circle

When I was seven or so we got a book out from the library that was illustrated in the style of an illuminated manuscript. It was the first time I'd ever seen that art style, and I became obsessed with it.  Compared to all the other illustrated books I'd read it was like seeing in colour for the first time; it satisfied a need for order and complexity and beauty that I hadn't realised I had.

The notes on the illustrations mentioned books of hours and the Book of Kells. I had no idea what a book of hours was, but 'Book of Kells' sounded enough like a specific title that I asked a librarian at my tiny local branch if they had or could get a copy. She told me that it lived at Oxford (good guess, it's at Trinity College) and that only researchers and doctors were allowed to touch it; a colour reproduction of anything but the Chi Rho page was similarly out of reach.

So I decided that I had to get a doctorate so they'd let me visit the book. And over the years I collected books on illumination and celtic knotwork, learned calligraphy and got to hold a book of hours, but the want never went away: I must get a degree; I must get to read the Book of Kells. It was a low-level obsession, but it was indeed an obsession.

Last year Dave and I went to Dublin for our first anniversary, and we took an afternoon to wander slowly through the exhibition on the book, how it was made and who had made it and what had happened to it afterwards. And I finally got to see it: the four gospels, each open. They were under glass, and I figured that was the closest I'd ever get to my desire to look at every single page.

Then Trinity College digitised it. All of it. Even the backs of the decorated pages so you can see how the colours bled through the vellum and the words on the facing page transferred over.

So I've spent today flicking back and forth between my doctoral thesis and the four gospels, working towards the degree that I decided I couldn't live without because I thought it was the only way to see the book that I can now spend as much time as I want paging through without leaving my desk. It's been twenty years. The satisfaction is unspeakable.

From Trinity College's Digital Collections

Invasion

So my parents have come to visit. Their only other trip to England was for the wedding a year an a half ago, so this is the first time they're experiencing the place as itself, rather than the ground zero of a major life decision. And this is the first time I've experienced them out of their native habitat without being completely preoccupied with the logistics of herding relatives.

I'd forgotten all of the cultural differences between here and Virginia; they all come rushing back every time I watch my father amble up to someone - usually a barista - and begin what sounds like an in-depth conversation about the meaning of life as a preamble to ordering coffee. We've gone into nearly every grocery store in Reading and Norwich for the purpose of reading all the labels and then buying the most alien items - Saturday it was pate, steak-flavoured crisps, millionaire shortbread, and a single pork pie. My father zipped into the Poundland and bought a case of Coleman's mustard while my back was turned. It took the better part of an afternoon to explain to my mother why UEA is a brutalist monstrosity rather than the Oxbridge-esque Gothic confection that she and everyone back home has apparently been imagining. They both seem to be enjoying everything we're seeing, but what they really want to do is find the key to our garden shed and spend the week getting the back yard in order, with an option on more steak crisps.

But in between all of that the copyeditor's queries have been dealt with, tuition has been paid, work has been done, and it would appear that the only people who have noticed I'm not actually working are the two compatriots with whom I'm supposed to be organising a conference for December.

Oh, my sister's here too. But this is her third trip over and she's the only person on the planet who does exactly what I ask her to do the first time I ask, so it's easy to forget she's there because she doesn't require watching, just intermittent feeding, like a pet snake.