The Light of Intellect

As you know, I went to drool over the illuminated manuscripts at the British Library over the weekend.

For most of my visit I was pretty much undisturbed, having got there hideously early.  It was only as I was coming to the end of the exhibition that I started encountering people.

At one point there were two teenage girls who had come in and done the entire exhibition in about ten minutes flat (I was there for two hours, and only the impending threat of eye strain and starvation forced me out in the end).

They were staring at one of the displays about ten feet away from where I was when one of them said:

‘What I don’t get, right.  What I don’t get is how come if they had these huge bits of paper, how come they made the writing so small? I just don’t get it.’

This was the same girl, who only moments later said to her friend:

‘Look at that picture.  It looks just like it was painted by hand…’

Her friend, to her eternal credit, very calmly said:

‘It is.  They all are.’

To which her friend said:

‘What for? I don’t know why they’d bother when they could print ‘em.’

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