East London united

  I’m just back from collecting the archive of the writer and critic John Berger. John generously donated his archive to the British Library’s collections, but on the (entirely reasonable, and enjoyable) condition that we come out to pick it up from his Alpine home…and help out on the farming while there. In the end the weather conspired against haymaking, but I spent a very pleasant few days sorting through the archive in preparation for its transport back to the UK, and recording my impressions on audioboo. Although John has lived in the Haute-Savoie for many years now, he hails, like Harold Pinter, from East London, and was born in Stoke Newington, not far from Pinter’s Hackney. I haven’t as yet found any Pinter letters in John’s archive, but John was delighted to know that his papers would rest alongside Harold’s archive: just one of a number of examples of the ways in which real-life relationships extend to posterity in our climate-controlled storage area.