August 6 At the British Library

I have never made it over to see the manuscripts at the British Library, so today while John went off to find the houses of Dickens and Johnson, I walked just up the street to see what was there. Imagine my thrill to read, in her own hand under the dim preservation light, Charlotte Bronte's final paragraphs, starting:

Reader--I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and the clerk alone present.

I had a surge of fangirl insanity as strong as when Alan Rickman bumped me on the knee at the National Theatre (have I mentioned that before?)

I was paging through the leaves of a facsimile of the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, when a large Anglo-Indian gentleman said from behind me, "That can't be the original manuscript!" I dropped the page guiltily and said, "no, it's for children to look at and people like, um, me." He sighed, and said, "Did you know the manuscript came from S_____?" (I did not understand the name.) "There is a movement in S_____ to get it back. It has traveled Europe for many years, but it properly belongs in S_____." "Do you live there?" I asked, still having no idea where he was talking about. "Yes," he said. "But we will never see the book in our town again."

We pondered that fact for a moment. "St. Cuthbert is buried at Durham," he commented. "Yes, I've visited his tomb, and that of the Venerable Bede." "You saw it? At the back of the little chapel?" We spent some minutes discussing the cathedral at Durham before he walked away, the only member (perhaps) of a popular movement to return the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels of St. Cuthbert back to the town of S_____.