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Jaran by Kate Elliott (ignore the terrible cover). Actually pretty good, one of the better titles from a mostly bad Humble Bundle of women's sci-fi and fantasy. Quite similar to Lois McMaster Bujold but not as good. Partly a romance, although I found that a bit unsatisfying.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan. Fantastic snapshot short stories of mostly rural Irish life. Beautifully written and observed. Sad and poignant for the most part. She's such a good writer.

There was also the general embarrassment that when Estates watered the large planters in the courtyard directly above the reading room, the water leaked through the roof, was caught by a hose and directed into a bucket on the floor. In the *Special Collections Reading Room*.

As the researcher had received his four lucky dip items, he hadn't been able to match up the block to the damaged binding, which we now did, and he solemnly handed me back the box with the block of wood to go back to its resting place in the stack.

It turned out that part of the binding of the book was so damaged that a block of wood in the spine or covers had completely come out, and someone had decided to store it in its own box, separately.

He did not seem to have an answer to this. We stared at the block of wood in silence for a while. Eventually, I went to check the rest of his pile of boxes in the office, and one of the others *also* had the same shelfmark as the block of wood box.

I checked, and the shelfmark of the box matched one he'd ordered. I, equally bewildered, asked "Well, why did you order this block of wood?"

A few minutes later, having received his 4 boxes, the researcher came back with one of them. "Why", he asked, bewildered, "have you given me this block of wood?" I looked, and one of his boxes did indeed contain nothing but a small block of wood.

It is important to stress that the *only* information on these boxes was a label with the shelfmark, e.g. Rawl d.106. In and of itself, it conveys very little about the item itself.

Researchers could have up to 10 items stored in the office at a time, but only 4 at their desks at once. Sometimes they asked for specific ones, but often it was a lucky dip, and they got 4 at random. This particular researcher just asked for that, so I brought him 4 boxes.

And a copy was sent down to the stack team underground, who fetched the grey archival box with the same shelfmark, and delivered it to me in the reading room. I collected together all the items for the same person in the back office.

Basically, the way researchers ordered items from the stacks (rare books, manuscripts, maps, papyri, you name it), was that they filled in a little slip with their name, the date, and the shelfmark of the item. Nothing else about the book or whatever it was. This was then copied out by hand.

This is a totally new skill for me! I'm hoping to improve on it through practice, as it makes it much easier to pitch starting notes, if I can sort of hear them in my head. It's hard to explain what I do normally (before this) - I can sort of rationally know what I'll sing, but I can't hear it.

It requires a huge amount of concentration to stop the note I'm "hearing" slip away, and to play the next note after it, and so on. And it's not necessarily in the right key, as I don't have perfect pitch, but it's probably close, my relative pitch is fairly good. It helps to *almost* hum it, too.

This is different from, say, being able to call a pop song to mind and "hear" it, because I can't really do that with a choral part (I don't sing the tune), and because I can speed it up, slow it down, play it one note at a time, etc, in a way I can't with a song in my head.

Sounds idyllic, enjoy!

I don't remember many other books at secondary school (we also did some theatre and poetry). At primary school we read Goodnight, Mister Tom and I Am David.

UK: at GCSE, we did Lord of the Flies (an interesting choice, at a girls' school) and Great Expectations. I enjoyed Great Expectations, but we didn't read the whole thing for school, only sections on the Magwidge plot. I read the rest at home for fun. Didn't like Lord of the Flies much.

I was very surprised to see Abingdon deliberately not included in Greater Oxford, given the number of people who live there and commute to work in Oxford.

EndNote is very good for editing your own citation styles if you need to tweak formatting things. You can do it in RefWorks but it's fiddly.