Ssssh! Can someone shut up the chattering oldies in the British Library?

written for The Telegraph, 13 February 2014

The oldsters in the Manuscripts Room are as bad as Mrs Richards

I’m spending today – and most of the next month – in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library, poring over the clear italic handwriting of the first English writer to translate Euripides, the 14-year-old Jane Lumley.

But if the youthful Jane were to pop into the British Library to try to get a quick spot of reading done, I doubt she’d be left in peace for a moment. I’m not suggesting the British Library is the latest creaky national institution haunted by the ghost of Jimmy Savile. But policing the behaviour of one’s fellow readers is a mass sport here. Nothing satisfies the academic ego more than putting a talkative library user in his or her place.

And – is there a delicate way to put this? – some of the library’s older patrons give the impression of being slightly hard of hearing. So it’s not the twentysomethings who need to bellow across the room to ask each other for advice interpreting an odd bit of manuscript. Elderly couples sit together, bickering over their family trees or loudly disputing a shelf mark. And that’s before you get to the ones who talk to themselves. Or intermittently moan, as if on a long-drawn, Arthurian deathbed.

Yet like Mrs Richards in Fawlty Towers, with her selective hearing aid, my senior colleagues’ hearing seems to magically repair whenever anyone under the age of 30 shifts in a seat. Every year, before exam season, hordes of undergraduates descend on the library, and letters of complaint from the nation’s greybeards appear across the national press.  Never in the field of human conflict have so many youngsters been silenced by so many hypocrites.

Of course, the people who really disturb our peace here in the British Library aren’t the readers at all. No one’s as chatty as the security guards on the Rare Books Reading Room – whose salaries are paid for by your taxes. But I’d never be so foolish as to complain about them…