Library lists
[Posted with the permission of the author, David Helliwell]
Almost exactly five years ago, I was dismissed on the grounds of age from my post as Curator of Chinese Collections at the Bodleian Library. I had been in office for over 41 years. The last six of those were particularly pleasurable as I was able to spend all my time organising, identifying, and cataloguing the Library’s “special collections” of Chinese books. Meanwhile, Joshua, who had been appointed to take over all my other duties, did all the hard work.
My teenage years were spent in the 1960s, and we children of the sixties, as demonstrated so well by Paul McCartney at Glastonbury this year, never grow old. We simply become less young. We also have the advantage of being able to recall what to many, if not to most colleagues in this room, is the distant past.