Blasts from the Past

It's not often that reading a Law Report produces the kind of 'wow' feeling that makes you stop what you're doing. Last night, after getting back from working at one of the Careers Service events, I was reading the case of Re Hallet's Estate from 1879 in a law report actually printed in said year. It's always quite satisfying pulling a 130 year old book off the shelves, and you usually end up covered in dust, but this case was a little special and was rather like a legal message in a bottle. Someone had carefully annotated it in the margin with a list of citations for subsequent cases that considered it.


Of course, today you can just look on the internet to find out such information, but in 1919 (the most recent date in the old-handwriting) you couldn't do that, so this person had apparently taken on the task of writing it into the law report to save others the trouble of doing the research. Of course, it's a bit naughty to write in such an old book, although it would only have been 50 years old when they did it. But today it struck me as a great insight into an older world, and got me visualising Dickensian visions of legal studies. The handwriting was scholarly, and so regular and neat that I thought it was typed at first. It certainly makes a change to today's scrawled and barely legible annotations, the sort that I peddle. In fact, back in 1919 it was probably quite a heinous thing to do. I can't help but be intrigued by who it was, and the fact that we'll never know somehow makes it all the more interesting.

Unfortunately I rather deadened my appreciation of finding the book when I proceeded to walk into a door after leaving the library. College has taken the rather dubious step of fixing 'controlling' mechanisms (like posh versions of those 'arms' that stop doors slamming) to each of the outside doors, presumably so that they can be opened and closed from afar. This unfortunately means that doors now open and close very slowly, even when pushed very hard. I forgot this, and while walking apace, put my hand up to open the door, and before I realised that my hand was remaining stationary against the door while my body was rapidly approaching it, my nose had connected with the glass panel, leading to a presumable comical rebound. What's this 'progress'?