My old university does not have a library. It has a Learning Resources Centre. A huge, square structure encased in dark blue glass, its guts smelt of new carpet and blond wood and furniture polish, but never of paper. It has a place where you might go to borrow video cameras and record music, rooms set up in the 'theatre style' where you could shake as you gave presentations, and rows upon rows of computers upon which I first discovered how to argue endlessly with Americans on indie music forums and Tripod taught me the HTML for a paragraph break.

It wasn't always there. This building grew slowly among many others of its kind, nestling up close to the older parts of the university, the eighteenth century theological college with the slim, leaded windows and the tended flowerbeds. It opened at the beginning of my second year there; in my first there was a library, books piled almost to the domed ceiling of the old college's chapel. The walls were thickest stone, and the books were always cold to the touch. If you removed one from the shelves, you left a polite note in its place telling any curious searcher where you had gone to read it. Each small room branching off the spiralling staircase of the chapel was given to a particular discipline; English literature, my subject, was housed in the cellar.

The fat granite steps down were steep and someone, in mockery or genuine concern, had tied a length of blue twine along the wall from top to bottom to aid the unsteady. The most modern works of fiction were kept at the front of the short chain of rooms; by the time you reached Chaucer, the only light came from wall-mounted oil lamps converted to faint electricity. In the furthest corner from the stairs, where the books spoke in a language barely recognisable, was a single wooden study carrell. I can't remember how I first found it, hiding from tutor or deadline most possibly. From a distance it looked simply dirty, but as you came closer you could see that every scrap of its surface was covered with writing.

Stories were unfolding, philosophies were argued, advice asked for and got in three differing hands of biro, fountain pen and green felt tip. When space was tight old abandoned threads of thought and snippets of ideas were written over; I knelt down and looked closely, dates twenty and thirty years previously could still be seen scraped into the grain. I'd never passed anyone along these unswept shelves, never once seen anyone leave this part of the room, but in places the ink lifted away as I traced the outlines of names with my finger. When I couldn't read any more I sat for a while, wondering what I could add to this uncertain chronicle of lives. I raised my pen more than once, but always let it fall back into my lap.

By the beginning of the next term, everything had gone.