outside the library

This is quite a startling floral sentinel to greet one as one enters the Huntington Library - on a day on which, thank goodness, I finished writing my paper for CAA (which involved reading a number of manuals of nineteenth century ink manufacture, and finding out where oak apples - or oak gall - mostly came from: since you, too, were wondering, the answer is Northern Syria, especially around Aleppo, and also Italy.  I now have a burning desire to find the import ledgers of C19th ink companies).  

But I also mentally set this against images that came in via Twitter of picket lines outside the English and History faculties in Oxford.  I'd say - if I was still there, I would doubtless be on them, but that's a non-existent parallel universe, since if I were still there, I'd have been kicked out at Oxford's mandatory retirement age a couple of years ago, and - and what?  No way would I have felt ready to collect my pension, the existence of which is, however, in part, one of the reasons why faculty are now protesting: investment to keep the wolf from the door of my generation wasn't sustainable for those who followed us on the same terms.  And yet it feels vaguely indecent to be swanning into an excellent library (no, not the Bodleian, to be sure, but a pretty good library, all the same) set in impeccably manicured gardens on a warm and sunny February day, looking at images of the dearly familiar - if grey and chilly - steps of the St Cross Building.