So - I'm in Leeds, to give (on Saturday) the closing keynote at a conference celebrating 250 years of the Leeds Library - an old, old circulating library, that (with over 900 members) is still in existence. What the organizers who invited me didn't know beforehand is that just over a hundred years ago, my grandfather, Joseph Flint, would, as a very young man, have been behind the issue desk that you see here: he was a clerk, entering names of borrowed books in the register. Family lore - or the bit that . I've heard, anyway - says that this is because of his beautiful penmanship. Certainly, he didn't come from a library-style background, although at least one of his sisters, Rosie, became a teacher. But he must have been very young - and in 1914, he signed up to fight in World War One. The current deputy librarian apologized to me, this evening, that they didn't keep his job open for him when he returned. For return he did - but he was gassed in the trenches, and this meant that he had weak lungs, and flu carried him off in 1928, just before my father's fifth birthday. But even if I never knew him - obviously, he's a very close part of my immediate ancestry, and doubtless he inhaled and passed on some book dust together with that mustard gas. It's a privilege to be in his old workspace.
It was a wonderfully English reception - you don't hear people at US conferences saying Well, wait fifteen minutes - the organizers have just gone to the off license to get some more booze, and to Sainsbury's for some more sausage rolls ...
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