My Jo Cox journey #2

I placed a bet on the June 2017 General Election on how many seats the Conservative Party would win. At odds of seven to one, I bet £20 on them getting between 301 and 325 seats. And I won...!

I pondered for a long while what to do with the money: just pocket it, spend on an evening out or do something else? I decided to do something else: I bought 11 copies of the book written by Brendan Cox about the life and untimely death of his wife Jo.

Jo Cox MP was murdered by a right wing terrorist in the weeks running up to the EU Referendum in 2016. She was someone who stood proudly for democracy. And now we all know how much she also believed in all people having more in common than we have than divides us. And so it seemed a fitting way to spend my winnings. I resolved to donate most of the books to libraries that had featured in my life in some way.

Yesterday I went to my old University on stage two of my journey. (Stage one, blog to come but waiting for a picture, was my secondary school near Portsmouth). So it was a great pleasure to donate a book to the library of the University of Reading which I started at 40 years ago. I met the head Librarian Julia Munro and we talked about how the world and her library had changed in the last 40 years. It is currently having a refurbishment designed to create to more learning spaces for students whilst retaining good access to key texts. (Yes: university students do still read things in hard copy!)

That is a picture of the library when it was first built in the background. Julia kindly gave me copies of the last three annual reports on the Library which I will be reading soon. Thank you.

Later on, her colleague Sue Egleton took for me for a short tour around the Library as it is currently, albeit with lots of plastic sheeting and closed off areas. But I was delighted to discover some bookshelves featuring copies of the books that I referenced when studying psychology 40 years ago!

Sue revealed that her father is Trevor Eggleton who up until May this year had been a Buckinghamshire County Councillor for ten years. It is, as always, a small world!

Here is the bookplate that will be put in the book before it is added to the shelves of the University Library: