Debasement

Years ago, I wrote about De Basement of the Library at Trinity College Dublin TCD, my ould alma. Anyone with an open mind (and a library card!) could go down 2 floors in the Berkeley Library and browse the latest accessions. That's all the books, acquired under copyright regs, which were too niche to be of use to any of the current students or faculty. Before being shipped to a warehouse out near the airport, these books served as the repository of my weekend random-reading. That's part of the reason my 'mind' was so filled with triv: great for a pub-quiz.

But today, we treat of Debasement: where tawdry meets glitzy and honoured guests are parted from €21.50. I hold up (with tongs) The Book of Kells Experience. Here's the Introduction, 20 secs of young comely diverse people, being baffled [as L] by swooping pages of digital uncial; followed by 15 seconds of leaden instruction &  Book Now . It hasn't gone YT viral yet - maybe try tik-tok? It doesn't always work out when universities try to diversify their income stream - as the cytogenetics testing service damp squib attests.

I know of the existence of this cunning plan because of a front page flag on RTE.ie pushing one of their audio-podcasts aka an advertisement for this commercial venture by TCD. In it "Kate Varley reports on a new digital exhibition showcasing the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin" and gives a platform to the "Visitor Services Manager" and the "Head of Marketing" who are real people with real salaries. TCD hopes that enough €21.50s will come in to cover their salaries and the invoices from all the creatives who made the swoopy virtual world that keeps visitors at arms length from scholarship, a sense of history and quiet contemplation.

That worked nicely when I took my dear old dead dad to visit Clonmacnoise 25 years ago. After a 12½ min slide-show with voice-over [here come the vikings, head for the round tower Brother Fursa] and tonking the fibreglass replica-replacement of the High Cross, we were done! My Da was a restless cove: always moving on to the next box to [✓] and rarely pausing to Be in one place. Ragin', I would have been except that I'd been to Clonmacnoise before . . .

When we still lived in England in the late 80s, one Easter we had a vacation week on the Shannon in a rented cruiser. We left Portumna and headed North, and moored at the little wooden dock below the monastic settlement. We were all alone there, the river-tourist season being in its first chilly week. At day-break, I left my crew in their bunks and walked up from the river. There was nobody asking for [free] tickets and I could fossick about at my leisure. Standing on the wall looking South,I didn't have an epiphany, I didn't see god . . . but I could hear the plash of oars as a couple of drakkar hove round the last bend in the river with the helmsman calling cadence in Norse. Now that was magic.