A Tour of Tea with Blends For Friends

 

Knowing me well, as she does, my darling mother bought me a voucher for a tea-tasting experience for my birthday last year. Knowing my powers of organisation as she does, she was not remotely surprised when it took me over seven months to cash it in. But good things come to those who wait, and in due course, I strolled eagerly up to the Langham Hotel on Regent Street to spend the afternoon with Blends For Friends’ expert tea taster and master blender, Alex Probyn.

In recent decades tea’s supremacy in England came into question, seeing it frequently dismissed as sophisticated coffee’s country cousin. But with the rising ‘vintage’ trend, the humble cuppa is once again becoming ‘cool’ – evidence of this even as I made my way up Regent Street was the new T2 flagship store, all achingly hip neon and black signage and artfully displayed crockery. Tea shops, tea rooms and tea parties are popular with the young as well as the old.

Now, me and tea: it’s a lifelong love thing, not to say an obsession. In this I am classically British. In these isles, laying on a round of the cup that cheers but not inebriates is the most surefire method of gathering a family together, bonding with your colleagues, or demonstrating the sort of workaday, wordless devotion that underlies the most authentic love matches. Say “Cup of tea?” in almost any scenario, and the response will always be “ooooh, lovely!” It’s very typical of our buttoned-up, ‘careful now’ country that our greatest shared national indulgence should be such a modest one. As Bill Bryson, my favourite anglophile American, noted bemusedly, “I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.”

My memories of tea go back to my childhood, when my grandmother would make pots of the stuff on a more or less continuous basis all day every day, winter or summer, and saw no reason why she shouldn’t introduce her little granddaughters to the wonders of caffeine nice and early. Whenever someone makes me an extra-milky cup, or accidentally gives me sugar, I have Proustian memories of the mug with yellow flowers which was ‘mine’, and how she would call the bubbles on the surface made by the flow of tea from the pot (always from a pot) ‘kisses’. Nowadays, I like my tea strong enough to climb out of the pot by itself, and scoff at the idea of sugar. I might even entertain a green tea or a (whisper it) herbal infusion. But while my palate may have matured and diversified, my love for the brown stuff remains childlike if only in its insatiable greed. So I knew that I was in for a treat.

Having navigated the Langham’s intimidatingly luxe reception, I found myself seated at a table with a handful of strangers, waiting for the show to begin. Probyn was already presiding over a table laden with gleaming pots and sample shots of tea. This wasn’t like other ‘gift activities’ I’ve attended in the past, where the emphasis was on having fun. Quite apart from the intimidating levels of glamour at the Langham, the atmosphere was unapologetically aimed at aficionados – Probyn’s apparent idea of an icebreaker to put people at their ease was to ask the room if anyone had a favourite tea plantation (and alarmingly, one of our number did). I pulled out a notepad and tried to look serious, all the while wondering when we would be getting a cup of tea.

Alex began with a potted (hah) history of his life in tea. Ironically, he didn’t even drink tea before being employed by Tetley as a graduate trainee tea-taster 17 years ago (and by the way, who even knew there was such a job? And why didn’t you tell me???)

Having applied as a joke and getting the job almost on the strength of his inexperience, he fell in love with the tea industry, eventually shifting from tasting to sales and marketing with a view to gaining the skills and experience he would need to set up his own business, Blends For Friends – a bespoke tea-blending service creating individual blends from over 750 ingredients. This was the end-game of today’s tea-tasting experience – we would try a wide range of teas, learn about how different ingredients worked together, and then finally design our own blends of tea which Alex would then go back to the lab and create for us.

He then moved on to the history of tea, taking us on a guided tour of 5000 years of camellia sinensis, from its mythical origins in China, when a leaf dropped by chance into the Emperor’s cup of hot water. The ancient Chinese tea trees were much taller than the bushes on plantations today, having not been cultivated, and initially monkeys were trained to pick the delicate ‘tips’ (as in PG, simply the top two leaves and the bud of the tea plant) from the tops of the trees – you can still buy ‘monkey-picked’ tea to this day, for grotesque amounts of cash. He described the expansion of the tea tradition into Japan and the Far East, and its slow, circuitous route to Europe, finally reaching its spiritual home in London in the 1660s via the Dutch East India company – as in so many things, including gin, the Dutch were way ahead of us, and had been guzzling tea since the sixteenth century.

As a foreign imported product, tea was heavily taxed, but as its popularity grew, this became unsustainable – tea smuggling was rife, and the smugglers would often adulterate the blend with whatever came more easily to hand, principally sheeps’ droppings. Pitt the Younger conceded defeat and lowered the tea tax in 1785. In later years, the British Empire sought a more economical source for its citizens’ immoderate lust for the brown stuff by furtively exporting grafts of tea plants from China with a view to transplanting them to its colonies in India; only to find the Indian farmers much amused at being solemnly charged with cultivating a plant that had been growing ignored all over the subcontinent for as long as anybody could remember. Imperialism fail.

Since then, tea has been perennial in Britain, particularly after the advent of the convenient teabag in the 1950s (97% of all tea consumed is now sold in teabags). Tea endured a brief dark age during the 1990s and 2000s, as consumer culture fell in love with coffee; but now, sales are reviving. Tea is even beginning to acquire the same cult status as wine and whiskey in some circles, with as much attention being paid to provenance, preparation, and other mystifying factors such as ‘nose’ and ‘mouth-feel’. And hence the availability of tasting sessions such as this one.

Alex went on to explain tea’s surprisingly enduring methods of production – due to the delicacy of the harvesting process, 96% of tea is still picked by hand. Due to its sensitivity, it is still grown primarily in China, India, and parts of Africa – warm, wet parts of the world, between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Although some tea estates have been attempted in the UK, the challenges of raising a crop here mean that you pay a premium for a cup of tea Alex dismissed as not much worth the drinking. He explained how so many different types of tea – black tea, green tea, white tea, blue tea, and even yellow tea – are all created from the same leaf, by variations in the wilting, drying and cutting processes. He also took the opportunity to dispel the myth that green tea is ‘better for you’ than regular black tea – the only difference between the two is the degree to which they have been oxidised, and in the scientific research done to date, green tea has not been demonstrated to be significantly better for your health.

He then went into detail about the bizarre system by which types of tea will be graded, resulting in such tongue-twisting descriptions as a ‘SFTGFOP’ (that’s ‘Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe’ to you and me – I know, means nothing to me either). As a librarian, such whimsically random classification boggled my mind a little. Moreover by this point, as you can imagine, I was gasping for a nice hot cuppa – and fortunately, this was when the lecture ended and tasting began.

Alex suggested we take notes as we went along, to help us decide later what style of tea our bespoke blends should be. While our palates were fresh, we began with the more delicate types of tea – white tea, green tea, and blue tea (also known as Oolong tea). These had some strange flavours that I would never have associated with tea: the poetically-named Bai Hao Silver Needle (so called because of its long, pale grey leaf) tasted of almost nothing, but with a whisper of grapefruit, and almost… hay? The Yunnan Green was brewed to perfection, avoiding the bitter taste that results from scorching the leaf with boiling water straight from the kettle – but nonetheless had a lingering suggestion of smoked haddock. And the Taiwanese Oolong, apparently a very expensive tea, tasted like nothing so much to me as chalk.

We then moved on to the different varieties of black tea, with varieties from the three big producing nations China, India and Kenya. My very favourite was the lapsang souchong, which smokily evoked bonfires and autumn nights. After all these subtle flavours, the Earl Grey tasted loud and artificial, the bergamot bossily overpowering my tongue.

We then had a short comfort break (something of a necessity after drinking such a large volume of tea). Then on with the tasting, moving into what cannot properly be called teas but rather infusions – Rooibos, rosebuds, hibiscus and red berries. The rooibos was sweet and honeylike, the rosebuds like Turkish Delight, and the scarlet hibiscus tongue-twistingly sour – the red berries neither tasted, looked or smelled like anything much. Ironically, Alex told us, the major ingredient in most ‘red berry’ teas is in fact hibiscus, which gives the tea its vibrant red colour and adds flavour, its sourness toned down by artificial berry flavourings.

The final tasting was a trip around the world, trying some types of tea we were unlikely to encounter in the supermarket. A beautiful Chinese flowering tea blossomed up from the bottom of the glass like some weird undersea creature, tasting of nothing much but looking marvellous. Stone-ground Japanese Matcha green tea looked like pond water and tasted powerfully of fish, but was oddly moreish. A caffeine-rich Argentinian iced tea left me cold, but I loved the sugary, flavourful hits of Moroccan mint tea and an Indian Massala Chai rich with ginger and cinnamon. And finally, a special treat: a shot of Chinese Pu Erh tea, the most expensive tea on earth – a fermented, aged black tea, matured in cakes for years, sold for mind-boggling sums at auctions to tea connoisseurs. Alex told us that cakes of the best Pu Erh could sell for close to a million pounds, meaning a single pot could set you back about £4000. However, like so many things people are willing to pay silly money for, it must be an acquired taste – the only note I wrote for it was “urgh!”

The tasting session had overrun, and we were left with very little time to design our blends. I opted for a marriage of tradition and whimsy, choosing a black tea base of lapsang souchong, lifted up with the sweetness of rose petals and the sour snap of hibiscus – I called it Sweet & Sour Tangy Tea. Alex suggested balancing the sharp hibiscus with some citrusy lemongrass, and I was more than happy to take his advice. It arrived about a week later in a vacuum-sealed container, and was utterly delicious and scarlet once brewed. So all in all, it suits me to a ‘T’ (sorry).

Musings on management

Wow, long time no blog! I started this one about 3 months ago, and things have changed since then – but I still think it’s a useful reflection on management for anyone who, like me, is reaching the point in their library career where it is a consideration. Enjoy!
—–

I’ve been thinking a lot about good management recently, not just in the context of a library service but more generally, as a set of skills.

Professionally, I’ve never previously considered myself to be ‘management material’. In my working life, I have always positioned myself as someone who delivers results, rather than someone who makes decisions about what should be achieved – I found the idea of management-level power and responsibility scary and not at all appealing. I’ve always been happy to subscribe to strategies dictated from higher up, to aim to exceed the bar that someone else has set. My attitude has always been can-do, and I’m quite good at identifying how to – but what to do at the macro level has mostly been someone else’s department.

I had framed this lack of lean-and-hungry zeal in the context of my chosen profession. I’m a librarian, a naturally assistive rather than assertive role, service-orientated, helpful. And having always been lucky enough to be managed well, perhaps I had been content to follow simply because I had had great confidence in where I was being led, and in the people doing the leading.

Moreover, I feared that management would take me away from what I love most in my job – direct contact with service users: forming strong relationships with them; the high of getting it right for them, and of seeing them benefit from that.

My last post had a much more diverse and devolved range of responsibilities than I had had hitherto, and this along with other factors got me to thinking about myself as a professional, and the career path I would like to carve out for myself in years to come. For the first time, that wish list now includes a wish to take charge. Take charge of more than just my own workload: of procedures, of planning, of people. Call the doctor, I’ve contracted managerial ambitions!

I think the main lightbulb moment behind this change has been my realisation that, if you are a manager, you do still have direct contact with customers of sorts – that is, with people to whom you’re delivering a service. It’s merely that the service you are providing is good management. And the client base you are delivering it to is not the service users, or even the person paying your salary; it is the people you have been assigned to manage.

Management, like government, cannot be effectively imposed. If you can’t persuade your team to buy what you are selling, you will fail as a manager. Even if your team nevertheless succeed, it will be in spite of you, rather than because of you. If, however, you can offer leadership that they can confidently follow; authority that they can respect; and support that they can trust, you can enable them to achieve far more than they ever could have done without you there.

Looked at from this perspective, a desire for managerial responsibility has no conflict at all with a service-oriented work ethic. And so, I can confess: I’d like to manage staff one day. And I’d like to be great at it, thank you very much. And so I’ve been giving it quite a bit of thought.

It seems to me that there are three core attributes that have been shared by all the excellent managers I have had the good fortune to work under. These are the traits that I should seek to emulate to prepare myself for a future managerial role.

Competence

This is probably the most important thing for anyone who seeks to tell other people what to do – they should be demonstrably knowledgeable in their field, and capable in their own role within the organisation. It is possible for managees to forgive their manager any number of shortcomings and irritating quirks, as long as what needs doing that only the manager can do gets done efficiently. It’s not the only thing that matters, but it’s the bedrock on which everything else is built. Competence at the top inspires confidence in the workforce, as well as simply serving as a good example.

Clarity

As a manager, a good bit of one’s time will inevitably be spent telling people to do things they don’t want to do, and making sure they do it. Nobody enjoys this. However, from my observation, management style is key to how painful this process is for all parties.

Most workers accept the fact that they will sometimes have to do things they don’t like. However, if you want co-operation and commitment, rather than mere mulish compliance, it is essential to communicate clearly what exactly it is that must be done; why it is that it has to be done; and when exactly it has to be done by. This covers the manager’s back as much as it helps their team to find focus.

Clarity is also about everyone knowing the difference between a discussion and a decision, an idea and an instruction. The clearly written summary of assigned action points is the manager’s friend. Nobody likes being told they have failed to do something they were never aware they needed to do in the first place!

Consistency

This goes back to confidence, which is to my mind the lynchpin of the relationship between a manager and their team, and the effectiveness of the team overall. Nothing will demoralize a workforce faster than a sense of instability. People who think that unpredictability as a management style is somehow motivating, that chronic insecurity keeps staff ‘on their toes’, are little better than sadists in my opinion.

Quite aside from the human element, it’s counterproductive. If half of a team’s time is spent trying to keep track of the fluctuating tides of their manager’s mood and allegiances of the moment, then that is half its potential productivity lost. If your team is hesitant to follow your instructions because they are often countermanded or simply disowned whenever it becomes expedient, then delays and failures of delivery will soon become systemic.

Consistency is also important when it comes to interpersonal behaviour. You can’t tell your team that you value and support them one moment, and then attempt to cow them by emphasising their disposability and dependence upon your good will then next. You cannot expect one member of your team to trust you, if you share their colleague’s secrets and shortcomings behind their back. It is important to remember – teams talk. If you try and play one off against another, you’re going to be found out.

There are plenty of other characteristics that may be desirable in a manager, and different teams will want different things at different times: charisma; creativity; caution; compassion – these attributes and many more may be called upon at different stages of any management career. But without the holy trinity above – competence, clarity and consistency – you will not be able to provide a good management service to your team; they will not buy in to your management of them; and everyone will suffer as a result.

Come on 2015, let’s be having you

In a bit of a lull in the festive season, I have decided to get cracking on my new year’s resolutions.

I mentioned last year how I like to compartmentalise my past, and 2015 more than most years will give me ample opportunity to do so. This December has been very much a month of cutting off and letting go, and January will be a fresh start in more ways than one. I’m going to be so busy that if I manage to achieve anything at all, I’ll consider myself to be doing well, what with a couple of fairly hefty resolutions being more or less thrust upon me:

1. Do fantastically well in my first permanent post-qualification Library role.

The University of West London have very bravely agreed to take me on as Academic Support Librarian for their School of Nursing, Midwifery and Healthcare, and I will be starting on 5^th January. This is a logical sort of follow-up to my most recent role at LSHTM, but will also include a lot of new responsibilities, as well as a new institution in a new part of London, eventually within a new campus. I’m very excited, and a little bit terrified, but what I mostly am is grateful to be given such a great opportunity, and determined that UWL will have no reason to repent their choice. I plan to exceed their expectations and expand my own experience, and this is the main thing I intend to devote my energy and resources to this year.

2. Make a home

Having been saving about a third of our incomes for four years, my other half and I are finally ready, at 30, to join the adult population and buy our first home. I know this is something most people do, and often much earlier than we have managed it, but I am still unreasonably proud of us for having reached this point at last. Things are now moving fast – I put in an offer on a very nice flat just yesterday, and while that is of course no guarantee the whole thing is all sewn up, I’m excited by the idea that we may very soon be shutting our very own front door, growing weedy tomatoes in our very own back garden, and screaming blue murder when our very own boiler explodes and costs a small fortune of our very own money to repair. Ho for belated grown-up-ness!

Frankly, I think those two things together will be enough to be getting on with, don’t you? 

No?

Oh all right then…

3. Devise and keep up a new fitness regime

New job has the slight disadvantage of being the other side of bloody London to where I live (one and a half hour commute each way is looking likely). This is going to throw my fitness regimen (such as it is) all to hell – farewell, lovely scabby affordable ULU Energybase!

I’m going to have to come up with a new one that fits in with my new life, or resign myself to ever-encroaching blobbery. I fear that workout DVDs at sparrow’s fart may be involved (sorry, downstairs). And maybe even Kegels on the train (will have to learn not to make that funny face when doing them).

4. Make lots of jam and chutney and foist it upon my friends and loved ones.

Not much to enlarge on here. I have the kit, I have the jars, I have the time. Beware, oh friends, an avalanche of preserves is coming your way.

5. Get more involved in my profession

Conferences; articles; the Twittersphere. There’s a lot of library-based action going on out there, and I want a part of it.

6. Make some progress on my family photographs archive

Work on this was brought to a slight standstill last year when my laptop up and died. The Apple Genius said that it was the logic board, but I believe it was simply a dirty protest against having to receive so many scans of my gurning infant visage. New logic board is now in place, so we shall find out who was correct in the coming months.

7. Make a start on The Quilt

Along with the crates of photographs my mother offloaded on me (see blogs passim), I also received a rather lovely thing: the top half of a patchwork quilt. It’s in a thousand shades, with scraps of a huge range of vintage fabrics, all tacked with newspapers and magazines of the period it was made. It was pieced and stitched together by my mother and grandmother back in my mother’s late teens, a time when she and my nan could barely me in a room together without biting each other’s heads off. I like to imagine them stitching up the quilt together as a sort of stalemate or truce. A year or so ago Mum suggested I might like to finish it off, as I had been making a desultory attempt to learn quilting from my very gifted craftswoman, my boyfriend’s mother Pat Ashton-Smith. It has ever since been scrunched up in a bag under my desk. This year, I want at least to get it padded and pinned preparatory to stitching it up – in the long run, I’d like to give it to my niece, so that it will have passed through the hands of four generations of the family.

And those left over from last year…

8. Finish knitting this jumper…

…if only so I can start knitting something else. I am sick of the sight of the damn thing.

9. Learn French

If there’s one thing long commutes must be good for, it is surely listening assiduously to the adventures of Didier and Patrice and the improbable series of events that lead them into reciting irregular verbs by the hour. Oui je peux!

10. Write. Write write write write write!

It’s been a good year for writing. I’m going to keep it up. Watch this space for more gibberish, excerpts of novels in the works, book reviews and maybe even some poetry (oh God).

EDIT: and a few more…

11. Pass my driving test

Self-explanatory really.  This will seal the holy trinity of adulthood – employed, property-owning driver 😛

12. Birth Companions

I am doing some voluntary literature search work for Birth Companions, a very worthwhile organisation.  Finally have some time to devote to this over the holidays, and will be proud to get it done and hopefully help them extend their influence.

SECOND EDIT: and two more…

13. Self care

I am extremely bad at this.  I am going to make 2015 the year I give myself a thorough and long overdue MOT – actually register with a doctor and a dentist, and sort out a few niggling problems that have been hanging around (and no doubt getting worse) for years out of idleness.  I’m an old girl now, can’t just keep expecting things to sort themselves out.

14. Join the British Bone Marrow Registry

Saw an interesting feature about bone marrow donation on TV over Christmas, and read some more on t’interweb – it really doesn’t sound as horrible as I imagined it, and it offers a fairly unique opportunity to save somebody else’s life without having to do anything unreasonably heroic (I am a colossal wimp, so this is useful).  I’m already signed up for someone to have any of my bits and bobs once I am dead – no reason not to offer up the regenerating parts whilst still alive.

And one more for luck…

15.  Learn to jive

Got a swing dance class with Swing Patrol for a Christmas present, which I just cashed in.  I SUCK like the suckiest thing to ever suck, but I loved it.  I am going to follow this up and get splendid at dancing, like the fabulous ladies I saw tonight whose calves seem to be spring-loaded.

Love letters to libraries

So, for a nice change, libraries have got some press attention and some rather glamorous cheerleaders at the moment. Neil Gaiman has spoken out in their favour, describing being left alone in a library as an inquisitive 8-year-old as akin to being given “the keys to the kingdom.” Caitlin Moran, Malorie Blackman and Carol Ann Duffy have raised their voices in support of endangered Liverpool libraries; and the Guardian have seized the zeitgeist by asking their readers to submit their ‘love letters’ to the libraries that have loomed large in their lives.

Unsurprisingly, quite a lot of these love letters are from we librarians – unsurprising because let’s face it, none of us are in this job to get rich. Underneath our sensible cardigans, librarians are by and large a passionate breed – passionate about people, passionate about public services, and passionate about information. And we tend to be passionate about the places we work as well. Be it in concrete campus block or art-deco edifice, city centre or stately home, when people think of libraries – even now in the digital age where so much of the resources we offer are virtual – it’s primarily as physical spaces, places to escape to, to study in, to take refuge from life’s distractions.

So here’s my love letter to libraries – the physical spaces rather than the abstract idea. I can’t claim to have been faithful, but I have loved many sincerely. And I hope to love again.

I’ve been lucky enough to work and study in some amazing library spaces. The University of East Anglia, where I did my first degree, was designed by brutalist architect Denis Lasdun. Dismissed by the ignorant as ‘ugly grey boxes’, the campus buildings, including the Library, have a stark, uncompromising beauty to them, particularly when juxtaposed with the surrounding greenery and glittering artificial ‘broad’.

I spent many a happy hour gazing out of the windows of the little carrels on the second floor at drizzling rain or drifting snow, flurried leaves or sparkling sunlight. From the right window, you could catch the view of Norfolk Terrace, one of the two distinctive ziggurat-shaped halls of residence that appear on all the university’s publicity materials. While the Library itself might not have been much to look at, it provided the perfect vantage point to see the best of what there was to see – a sort of concrete metaphor for the function of libraries (and librarians) in general.

My next library of note was the first one I worked in – the University of Oxford’s Vere Harmsworth, serving the students and staff of the Rothermere American Institute. It was a lovely building, laid out in interleaved layers in a way that made the big, glass-and-steel space feel curiously cosy and intimate. However, at this point I was living in Oxford, so was a bit of a library slut – I may have earned my crust at VHL, and done quite a bit of studying there (sometimes at the same time – good old late shifts on the enquiries desk!), but I also cheated on it with the Radcliffe Camera, Worcester College, and of course that ultimate doomed library love affair, the Bodleian. Like a bad but charming boyfriend, it left me breathless and elated and utterly out of my depth, but I just couldn’t help but come back for more.

Upon moving to London and looking for a library traineeship, I struck gold with the Foreign Office Legal Library. The Legal Department had managed to secure a plum set of offices off the corner of the famous Durbar Court, and in one of these was the small yet perfectly formed Legal Library. Walking into the King Charles Street building each morning, clipping across the courtyard and up the grand staircase, strolling through the marble colonnades to a high-ceilinged, gilded room full of books, spending the day helping people to answer questions that would literally change world affairs – sometimes I had to pinch myself to believe that this was actually my job (although the pretty much perpetual infestation of incredibly impertinent mice did help to keep my head out of the clouds).

There was another library space at the FCO, the grand Ansel Library, a great wood-paneled room, all wrought-iron staircases and galleries. Unfortunately, after the controversial closure of the FCO’s library in 2007, the dispatch of its physical holdings to King’s College London, and the ‘rationalisation’ of its staff into an e-library service, its only permanent inhabitant was a large stuffed anaconda called Albert, which had been presented to Queen Victoria by a Guyanese bishop some hundred years before and hung up in the FCO for want of anything better to do with him. Although Albert himself could not be blamed, it was perhaps ironic that the FCO signed off a £10,000 taxidermy bill to have the ragged reptile re-stuffed at around the same time civil service jobs were cut in half to meet the call for cuts.

Having emptied the purpose-built library space of books and librarians, the administrators of the FCO’s estate seemed to be at a loss for what to do with it. The occasional forlorn cluster of hot-deskers huddled in from time to time with laptops, wrapped in scarves against the perennial cold, but on the few occasions I contrived to go in there (mainly to fulfil my lust for oak paneling) the room was almost completely empty, the silence that of absence rather than of feverishly scribbling pens and busily revolving thoughts. Although the Library was beautiful, it was the beauty of ancient Egyptian death mask – all lacquer, no love. Some time after my traineeship ended, the main Library was finally repurposed to house a book-heavy directorate (including a few librarians!). To the best of my knowledge, Albert the serpent still presides, a silent ‘ssssssshhh’ always poised on his tongue.

More recently, I have been working in the library of the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Yes, I am aware that I have been spoilt. The Library Reading Room is the finest room in a building positively dripping with art-deco style, occupying almost the whole South-West side of the insanely beautiful Keppel Street building. Everything about the room is striking: the high, wide windows facing onto Malet Street Gardens; the painstakingly maintained shellacked cork floor with its original geometric pattern (echoed by the decoration of the gallery railings, which includes some alarmingly swastika-like twists and turns); the serried rows of individual wooden tables; the pampered pot plants scattered between oxblood armchairs; the bust of Richard Doll benignly regarding the room from its perch on the old card index cabinet.

There are more study spaces – the Wellcome Gallery above where group work and quiet conversations are permitted; the Barnard Room (named after the School’s first Librarian, Cyril Barnard) where users can plug in their computers – the Reading Room being listed, it isn’t possible to just install plug sockets any old where. But when LSHTM alumni think back to ‘The Library’, this is the image that will come to mind, as good as unchanged since the School opened in 1929.

I will sadly be moving on from LSHTM in the new year, to the Library of the University of West London. At first I will be based at the Brentford campus; but in the summer, UWL will be opening a new library for the future campus at Ealing, and I will move there bag and baggage. A brand new library space, designed with the needs of the modern reader in mind rather than struggling to keep up with them, will be an unfamiliar environment. I have already been poring over the architect’s imaginings of how the space will appear when complete, and daydreaming about sunshine streaming through plate glass. I feel the beginnings of excitement, as at the outset of a burgeoning relationship, when nothing is yet known, and anything is possible…

A labour of love and librarianship: Archiving the family photos (Part 2)

Hello!  I know, I know, you’d probably given me up for dead.  A review of my New Year’s Resolutions fills me with shame and regret – a quick recap:

1. Give up drinking for January.
   Ah, well.  Ahem.  Moving on…
2. Learn to preserve food.
   This actually happened!  I have created pickled carrots and radishes!  See here!
3. Finish knitting this goddamn jumper.
   I still have three months!  Three!  *knits furiously*
4. Start writing this goddamn novel.
   I started a different one instead.  I’m calling this progress.  Shuddup.
5. Learn French.
   Nothing has happened AT ALL on this one.  Tres tres mal.
6. Get fit.
   Me and Jillian Michaels are once again in our sadistic abusive relationship.  The effects are as yet to be discerned.
7. Let my work into my life.
   This has really been happening!  I attended LILAC 2014, the information literacy conference, and got fully fascinated by all things info lit.  This expanded my Twitter-sphere of librarians and information professionals, and crammed my brain full of ideas for the future.
8. Be a good mentor.
   Another check!  The mentor scheme is complete, and I think we both got a lot out of the scheme.  More on this later.
9. Pick up my trumpet.
   Once again, ahem.
10. Write. Write write write write write!
    I have been writing, but nothing that is fit to be seen, unfortunately.  I have been loving writing it though, which was kind of the point!

So a mixed bag of success and failure, so far – let’s hope it’s a productive three months more.

So what on earth have I been doing all this time, I hear you cry?  Well, among other things, I have been getting cracking on this family photo project.  Although the bulk of the work is still to be done, there have been two significant steps forward:

1. Equipment
   I have acquired a photo scanner!  It’s an HP Scanjet 4850, and I’d love to pretend this was the result of an extended assessment and decision-making process, but in fact, this is what I was able to obtain second hand from family.  Seems to work fine though.
2. Software
   I spent a lot of time agonising about the appropriate method to catalogue these photos.  I couldn’t afford to shell out for a specialist piece of software; but the ultimate goal in all this was to share these photos with my family – a voluminous Excel spreadsheet of details with attachments was hardly going to fit the bill either.  Various free tools were tried and failed to fit the bill.  At this point, my colleague suggested Evernote – she was using it herself for a similar project, although she went on to describe the tool as “where I keep my life” (with a certain evangelical gleam in her eyes).  Having gotten started with Evernote, I was initially and pre-emptively thrilled (“This is exactly what I need!”) and then briefly disappointed (“What the hell kind of bloody hierarchy options are these?  Why is search so woundingly basic and stupid??”), and am now moving through the stages of Software Grief towards acceptance.  No, it doesn’t do everything I want it to do.  Yes, it does do enough to meet the purposes of 90% of the people who will use it.  Yes, it’s free.  Yes, it’s shareable and interactive.  Yes, you CAN search quickly and reliably for all the photos in the collection of you as a gappy toddler/your gran as a stunning newlywed.  It is good enough.

So I have the tools; I have the photos; what I still lack is any real strategy.  I have started scanning and indexing photos on a “I like this one” basis, but I have no long term plan.  I also still have no real systematic way of dealing with the fact that I have very little info on a lot of the photographs – mysterious men in uniform and ladies in Sunday hats abound.  Not to mention the ephemera.  Any tips from librarians/archivists/de facto family historians on ways to address these matters would be greatly appreciated.  In the meantime, please see below a picture of me, looking slightly barking mad, as a child.  Enjoy!

A labour of love and librarianship: Archiving the family photos (Part 1)

As I have mentioned here before, I have never been much of an owner of things.  Not that I don’t acquire things; I am as much a victim of our consumer culture as the next person, and almost ludicrously susceptible to suggestion.  Advertising was made for chumps like me, who are easy to convince that the purchase of some item, the acquisition of some bit of stuff can represent the turning point in their life, when they will finally start becoming the person they always wanted to be, just because the thing in question is the kind of lovely thing that such a wonderful person might have.  Unfortunately, it tends to work the opposite way round, and the thing, however, desirable and desired, loses its lustre as soon as I possess it, because surely if I can possess a thing, surely the thing itself can’t be so rare and wonderful as all that?

So I fall out of love with my possessions.  I lose them and give them away.  Every now and then (usually when moving house, but sometimes just when cleaning), a wild fit of eleutheromania comes over me, and I give in to the urge to ‘rationalise’ my possessions.  In fact, there’s nothing rational about it – it’s just an extension, or reversal, of the futile yearnings that drive my acquisitions in the first place: I want, in these moments, to be the kind of person who steps lightly through the world, who could – if they needed to – put all their worldly goods into a small suitcase and disappear, never call or write. Of course, getting rid of all my things doesn’t make me that kind of person; it just means I have nothing to read or wear.

In contrast to me, several of my loved ones are collectors to an almost pathological degree.  I spent an enjoyable but slightly mad afternoon a couple of weeks ago sitting on my best friend’s living room floor, drinking green ginger wine that she did not remember having bought and going through her superfluous stuff with a view to selling most of it at a boot fair. I found it strange to watch how hard it was for her to part with even damaged necklaces or half-used tubes of body cream.  She was very self-aware of her tendency to hoard, and actively trying to suppress it (the mess was getting a bit out of hand), but even so, she kept far more than I ever would have.

I had a similar double-take moment when I was moving in with my partner.  Helping him pack, I discovered that he had kept all of his old white shirts from secondary school (he was at this point 24 years old), as well as several knackered pairs of Converse, a uniform shade of washed-out grey with uppers barely clinging to their soles, which he lamely explained he’d kept “in case I ever needed them”.  Although I prevailed upon him to throw these away, he still has more books than he could ever read (and continues to add to the collection), as well as a whole drawerful of t-shirts, of which he wears only about five in strict rotation, the others being in various stages of decomposition but still allegedly “wearable”.  We’ve pretty much come to terms about this – although I sometimes feel swamped by things not mine, like I’m living in someone else’s home, I have got to acknowledge this is mainly because I choose not have much stuff, and his expands to fill the space provided.

My mother is another hoarder.  Up until recently, this has not presented too much of an issue.  She lives with her husband in a 3-bed house with an extensive loft, with more than enough room for a lifetime’s worth of tat.  A series of bereavements in more recent years have added substantially to her holdings, as crockery and furniture and bric-a-brac that no-one had the heart to sort or sell at the time fell into her possession, was tidied away and then forgotten.  Now, after almost 20 years in her home, she is selling up and moving to the North East, and the mountains of stuff must be confronted, decimated and transported.

As part of this exercise, I have inherited a jumbled mass of family photographs, interspersed with other ephemera like certificates, postcards, and letters.  The majority of these come from the combined estates of my late great aunt and uncle – he was a keen photographer, and both were adventurous travellers throughout their lives, being unencumbered by children.  Another large chunk comes from my grandmother, every surface in whose living room groaned with photographs of her three children and their children.  Others are my mother’s own, and others yet come from goodness knows were.  All in all, the collection fills two large crates.

The reason these have fallen to me is that, as a librarian, I have been deemed the best person to organise, rationalise and digitise these photographs.  The reason I have snapped them up is a bit more complicated; why would I, with my history of discarding, take on such a substantial volume of discarded history?

Part of it is simple professional interest.  While I never got round to cataloguing the books in our house (something lots of baby librarians apparently do as an exercise when they begin their Masters degrees) I do have the usual compulsion to organise and classify that goes with the profession; the mixed-up state the photos are currently in cries out for redress.  Moreover, the consummately digital nature of modern-day photography means that collections like this, full of one-of-a-kind prints, undated, with no GPS-determined locations or subjects identified by facial recognition software, will more or less cease to exist in a few decades.  It’s a privilege and a challenge to put the effort into rehabilitating these photos, to weave them out of their isolation into the ongoing visual history being created in the digital age.

The larger part of my desire to undertake this project is more to do with a sense of time running out.  The collection contains material from the early 1900s right up to my own teenage years.  Already, too many of the people in these pictures – my family – are strangers to me, and too many of the people who I could have asked who they were aren’t around anymore to tell me.  If this collection goes into my mother’s new attic, by the time they reappear again, the names of these people and places and the stories that go with them could be lost forever.

Finally, there’s the personal side of this, the desire to learn about my family – the ones I never knew, the ones I miss, and the ones I see all the time but may never have asked about a particular day when such-and-such a photograph was taken.

As the title indicates, this is only part one – I’m going to blog this project as I go, and update on the steps I take (and the mistakes I’ll doubtless make) in case it is of interest to anyone trying to do the same thing.  I’ll also take the opportunity to ask questions of a practical nature to any archivists or librarians who may be lurking about here – I’m going to need all the help I can get!  So, starting as I mean to go on…

Questions for librarians

1.  The digitisation part of the project will be challenging, but already I’m looking beyond it to the far bigger quandary – what do I do with the hard copy? Should I dispose of it altogether once digitised, or does it have value on its own account?  If so, how should I classify and organise it – by date, location, subject?
2. I am trying to conserve space by getting rid of the frames and albums – but at what point does a frame/album become a valuable, index-worthy piece of ephemera in its own right?  A lot of the pictures are stuck in Christmas cards etc. – should these be kept together as a single item, or separated and catalogued separately as photograph and card?