Monday
What’s that? I have a particular glow about me, you say? A profound serenity emanating from every pore? An unprecedentedly content expression replacing my customarily surly mien? Why, thank you, and yes I do indeed. For I have just come back from fulfilling my greatest lifetime ambition: spending a week at Gladstone’s Library. This is, really, just as it sounds. Prime Minister William Gladstone’s book collection is housed in a beautiful Victorian building in Flintshire, north Wales, that looks just as you would want it to look, inside and out. It has a residential wing full of gorgeously spartan yet gorgeously comfortable bedrooms, which means you can stay there, knuckle down each day in one of the oak-panelled nooks and crannies and – say – redraft in a week the goddamn book that has been giving you stick for the past six months. For example. Or, you could just go and read and walk round north Wales and enjoy yourself.
