Writing from Reading

I'm back in Reading, UK. I helped Sher by moving all of our stuff from the horribly expensive but poor-quality Holiday Inn to a beautiful modern corporate apartment costing half as much. The one nice thing about the Holiday Inn was its placement right on the Thames. You could see the Swans and ducks on the river from the room and we used the towpath as our route to the railway or the town centre. Fortunately, this apartment is right on the Kennet, another (much smaller) river going right through Reading. And we're now in the centre. We can walk the Kennet towpath to riverside restaurants, etc.

( More rants on English quality )

Oh well, enough on this topic!

_Greg

Oxford again

Yesterday I went back to Oxford. I love going somewhere for the second time. I have a general sense of things. My feet know how to get around without my having to consult a map. I retrieved my favorite jacket from the restaurant where I left it last Saturday. I joined a two hour walking tour which included part of the Bodleian Library.

I was very moved by the story of the original collection being burnt during the Reformation. Burning books is as horrible to me as burning people, and they did that, too. Still, few if any works were truly lost, and what a wonderful place it became afterwords. We are almost at the end of a great era: The great classical libraries are now engaged in digitizing their collections and making them universally available. In the early days there was nothing like copyright: if you could afford to copy a book, you didn't need to ask anyone's permission. Now, the only thing which keeps us from making all recorded human expression universally available is coming up with an acceptable alternative to copyright.

I finished my Oxford pilgrimage with afternoon tea at the Grand Cafe, the first coffeehouse in Britain. Coffee came there before tea, so I should have had coffee, but I'm not passing up any opportunities to clot my arteries with clotted cream while I'm here. Finally I went to Blackwell's, the oldest, biggest and best bookshop in Oxford. Another institution I love, and another institution which will hopefully soon pass.

_Greg