The Accidental Curator

1.
Butterfly Colony

It’s my last day in the office at the British Library, a dark November day in 2024. The white-yellow lighting feels especially bright. I’m ‘The Head of Contemporary British Collections’ for another fifteen minutes. Though I’m on my own I feel self-conscious, as if I am being watched. I know every little task I’ve done today, every encounter, has been my last here.

It is odd to sign off payments of tens of thousands of pounds knowing they are both routine and final acts. A bill for a sound archive contract comes in on my laptop. A few checks, a few clicks on the finance system, and it’s done. I assign another part of the budget, this time for an oral history project. Unusually it’s about the Library itself. We’ve been talking about it on and off for months. It’s the next phase of a long-going institutional memory project that stretches back many years. Even so it is always stop-start to fund. In this iteration we are making sure we hear the experience of workers in the lower ranks, not just the high-ups. Click, done.

I’ll tell my own story in writing.

In the very last minutes of the job there’s a super-sensitivity in the air – it’s like the feeling you have as you go into an interview and suddenly you’re aware of all your thoughts and none, how you will never be able to answer the simplest question; you’re not sure you’ll be able to confirm your name. But you do of course and ...