I'm now, apparently, a 'Yalie' - having gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an employee of Yale University- albeit temporarily. The day started early: the house where I'm living is on a nice quiet side street. But next door there's an old school-building being gutted and its metal fixtures are being crushed on site, starting at 7am, possibly every morning. This will guarantee I'll be up and ready to work on time. Breakfast: granola mixed with Scots porridge oats plus fruit. Then outside, where the rain has, finally stopped (last night the local TV channels were whipping themselves up into a frenzy of excitement about the floods - heaviest rain in NYC and Connecticut for over 50 years in the past few days, which I can believe). A walk through the main campus area of Yale to get to the Beinecke Rare Book Library, a massive modernist cube sited bang in the middle of the campus. It looks amazing on the outside, but even more stunning on the inside, because its marble walls are very thin and translucent, giving off a golden glow of natural light. Its million or more books and manuscripts are stored in a giant glass inner cube several stories tall. There's a Gutenberg Bible on display. If you look at the photograph you'll just notice that the reading room, where I'll be spending my time, is actually below ground-level in a sunken courtyard. All pretty swish. I attended an 'orientation meeting', which involved lots of form-filling and very friendly guidance, and then a tour of the facilities I'll be using during the next month - the lockers, coffee-makign facilities, etc. After that, off to the Office of International Students and Scholars, to go through more processing - my health cover checked, visa checked, social security number processing initiated, etc. This left just enough time for two more activities: first, a scurry up Orange Street to a grocery store to get some food supplies in, then, a quick scurry back downtown to have 45-minutes in the Yale Center for British Art before it shut for the day. Amazing collection of paintings, mostly from the 'long eighteenth century'. Not my own favourite period - too many pictures of twerps with their hunting dogs. But some lovely Tudor portraits, and really great to see Hogarths, Turners and others up very close in a very quiet space. I shall return. Tomorrow, though, I get down to work properly, and will be at the Beinecke all day with my first batch of manuscripts...