Now everyone is back on campus, it’s busy, etc and so on. I miss the summer, all that quiet. In a weird way I miss the pandemic times, when everyone was at home, and campus was eerie and quiet, I would still need to come in fairly regularly so I felt a bit like a guardian, keeping the torches lit until the return of All The People, if that day would ever come again. Actually mostly I was drawing maps of our building, with little diagrams in shared spaces to show that people would be at least six feet apart. The ‘worksite plan’. I had to do a lot of that, but I liked making colourful maps anyway. It was great to finally get people back on campus back then. I’m not saying I prefer it quiet, I do like the bustle of an active campus and having lots of people about our department, but I do appreciate those quiet moments. Here’s one place for some nice quiet, the Shields Library. It’s a massive library, one that I regrettably don’t visit as much as I used to. The first few years I was here I’d often check out books, mostly related to medieval language, but then I just stopped. I’m no longer studying in academia; for a while, before we moved out here, that was my life, long days and evenings in the library researching as best I could (did I really have to read every published article that referenced medieval alliterative poetry? I didn’t really know what I was doing, did I). I liked the quiet, the smell of the books, the space for ideas. One idea I had was ‘move to America’, so I did. I didn’t know what to do with myself when we first arrived in Davis in that November in 2005. Some days I wouldn’t really leave the apartment until late afternoon, and the only place I knew I’d feel at home was this place, Shields Library. I’d be here until it was time to get the bus home for dinner, writing emails home and updating my blog (this was before we got working internet at home), exploring the halls and picking up a pile of books about things like Chaucer or Anglo-Norman language to sit and look through, taking notes that would end up nowhere. I was glad when I finally got a job, but I’d still come here on my lunchtimes to get my head back in shape, before I really started sketching on all my lunches. All these years later, I am still needing that break to get my head back together, and usually that involves a sketchbook more than a book about Caedmon’s Hymn. I enjoyed drawing this. In fact it was sketched one day before my 18th anniversary of moving to the US. I always feel a bit funny around that time, always remember how I felt in those days, a mixture of excited and confused, and in desperate need of Weetabix.