Well, I can’t say that a day spent in the British Library following a cyber attack is a great experience, in spite of the friendliness and helpfulness of the librarians. There is no access to manuscripts. I realised that this is probably not because the manuscripts aren’t there and probably fairly easily available, but because the details of readers are held electronically. I felt sorry for the poor scholar who had come over from America to consult sheet music and offered to go and read it in York (he meant Boston Spa). There was no way he would be able to. It is still possible to consult printed catalogues for books published before 1972, but the class mark then has to be transferred to a traditional hand-written form and my handwriting is now illegible, so the author, title and classmark had to be dictated. It then turned out that three of the four books I wanted to consult were only available in the Rare Books Reading Room and when I got there, I was told one was in a safe which was inaccessible – I suppose, again, because of electronic security. I then made the fatal mistake of leaving a couple of rare books out on the desk while I went back to the humanities reading room to order two more books for tomorrow, having forgotten that I had handed in my reader’s pass, so I couldn’t actually get into the Humanities Reading Room without identification and was only allowed back into the Rare Books Reading Room with difficulty. They probably thought I had Alzheimer’s. I think I will spend tomorrow in the London Library.