Infinity goes up on trial

The four of us spent some of the meadows of the day in the reading library of one of the nation's leading museums, having spent the previous hour walking through its rooms, which were pregnant with artifacts and symbols of cultures and conceptualisms past. Anyway, at one point in this tall and deep reading room stood the artist by this one wall of books, pulling from the erudite shelves these thick and non-dusty and highly illustrated tomes of some of the leading practitioners of art these past few hundred years: her eyes lit like lamps at pages and drawings, many of which she had never turned before. Our delightful daughter, meanwhile, having taken herself away from one of the computers, moved soft-footedly to the children's section and pulled out a book on the Egyptians, followed by the plucking of a black and white outline for children from another shelf, and the taking up of the challenge offered by a box of crayons and colouring it in. Our son, meanwhile, sat at another computer - 5-years-old, imagine it, and already by the computer in the reading library of a major museum - determined not to be disturbed. In fact at one point I whispered him over to the fact of the children's books our daughter had already seen, but he had rushed back again to the computer and had already pulled up an image of a Corinth Civil War relic on the screen. No, these were good moments. All the lights in our heads were on, and the fact the room maintained its official silence maintained a kind of serenity over the occasion. I hope the fact I was frustrated with the artist on the way home for not having done enough herself to get people to see her work didn't detract from the importance of our time there. Or my anger with a neighbour for wanting us to persuade our landlord to let the neighbour buy some of the space by the side of the building we rent so that he can destroy yet another children's summer with ruddy building work.