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increase, from almost zero, of Turkish, Bangladeshi, Ethiopian, Polish, Jordanian and many other shop signs in London. But ads in a foreign language were rarer. He recalled a few in Spanish and French, but those had been for imported beers.
    He had no luck with the crossword. The clues appeared to make no sense to him and he could scarcely comprehend what answers they were supposed to suggest. It was the first time that he had been defeated by one of them.
    Later that day, in the office, as Barclay again tried to avoid looking at his computer screen, and during which gradually all correspondence on paper filled him with nausea, he noticed the t-shirt of one of his work colleagues as he passed by Barclay’s desk. This employee, James Monck, had recently been on holiday abroad, but had come back pale and sickly as if he’d actually spent a few weeks in a windowless room shooting up heroin. The garment he wore was an ill-fitting brown t-shirt, about a size too small, and it clung to his emaciated torso like a tight second skin. But it was the circular blue lettering at the centre of the t-shirt that drew Barclay’s attention. It wound around the silhouette of a town with a clustered multitude of steeples and domes. The lettering was in the obscure language that was appearing in his life on all sides.
    “ You picked that up on your holiday, did you?” Barclay asked him, pointing to his chest.
    “ That’s right,” Monck replied. “I hated to come back.”
    “ Where did you go?” Barclay said.
    “ Just over the edge.”
    “ Where did you buy the souvenir t-shirt? I don’t recognise the language or the silhouette of the town.”
    “ What, this?” Monck said. “Oh I got it in Qxwthyyothl.”
    Barclay’s expression turned quizzical at the last word.
    “ Which is where?” he asked.
    “ Qxwthyyothl is the capital city of Thyxxolqu.”
    Barclay took the article from his pocket that he’d torn out of the tabloid newspaper. He flattened out its crumpled surface and passed it over to Monck.
    “ Do you recognise this language?” he said, waiting as Monck examined the text.
    “ This is uxwqol in Thyxxolqus,” Monck finally replied.
    Barclay stared at him blankly.
    “ I said,” Monck repeated, “this is written in Thyxxolqus, which is the language spoken in Thyxxolqu.”
    “ What type of script is this? I’ve not seen anything like it before. It doesn’t even look Indo-European in origin.”
    “ I’m not an expert, and I wouldn’t know.”
    Monck handed back the fragment from the newspaper.
    “ Are there many people from this country you visited in London, do you know?”
    Monck grinned at the remark. His teeth appeared to be in the first stages of rot.
    “ Thyxxolqu yho quoxlu,” he said, in a strangely guttural tone before abruptly turning on his heels and walking away.
    Barclay wrote down the words he’d heard from Monck in phonetics, and managed to conquer his revulsion with the computer screen long enough to punch the characters into an internet search engine. He tried as many different combinations of the rendering he’d made as he could think of, but none yielded results. The article itself, written in the Thyxxolqus script, was of no assistance to him, since it could not be rendered by any of the keyboard language options available on the computer.
    •
    After he had finished doing nothing in the office, Barclay stopped off at the British Library. He did not care much for the hard angled building on the Euston Road that had replaced the old reading room beneath the mighty dome in the British Museum. His objections were not only architectural, for students who regarded it with, in Barclay’s view, much less reverence than the former space, constantly filled the new one. They treated it like a café, or meeting place, and he was concerned that proper research had given way to its being used to spend time searching online via laptop computers or else to improve one’s social circle on cyberspace.