This is a Britain where metro-hatred and provincial arse-licking has led to such fatuous absurdities as the farcical moving of the entire BBC sports department to Salford months before the Olympic Games come to London. Read that back twice and forbear to weep, groan, roar or wet yourself laughing.

Where does one begin with the BBC’s “regionalism”? They destroy local radio but move to Salford to “appease” the North. As if “the North” is one place! Do they think the citizens of Sunderland and Leeds are cheering because there’s a new BBC media centre in Salford? I should think even Mancunians are pissed off by it, let alone Geordies or Lakelanders. In-fucking-sane. But don’t get me started. Oh – you did.

Takes deep breath. Calms down.

Right…

Central London, like all great capitals, has its grand cathedrals, palaces, memorials, parks, public spaces, fashionable shopping districts and wild Bohemian quarters.

But also, like most great cities, it has its hidden secrets. Tiny little gardens, yards, alleyways, statues, institutions and passageways that maybe just metres away from the thronging concourses of Leicester Square or Cheapside, and yet are as quiet and undisturbed as a village churchyard.

One of my favourite areas of London is St James’s, that area bounded to the north by Piccadilly, to the south by the Mall and St James’s park, to the east by Haymarket and to the west by the Ritz and Green Park. Of course the very name summons up the worst images of elitism, aristocracy and old-fashioned, self-serving grandiosity. This is London’s clubland. Whites, Brooks’s, the Carlton Club, Boodles, Bucks, the Reform, the Athenaeum, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Travellers and even Pratt’s (it’s true). For all but a tiny percentage of you reading this, such places are at best amiably preposterous hangovers from a bygone age and at worst a symbol that Britain is still the same hide-bound, class-bound society it ever was.

I’m not going to go into all that. I’m just speaking of one who loves to wander around. I love to glance up at Blue Plaques and try to recreate in my mind the days of horse: when phaetons, landaulets, berlins, curricles, stage coaches and grand equipages dominated the streets that are now owned by vans, Boris bicycles, motorbikes, taxis and cars.

Let us just look at St. James’s Square in particular. Whenever I pass the north east corner I marvel that the memorial to WPC Yvonne Fletcher is never unattended. There are always fresh flowers and hand-written notes. In 1984 a member of the Libyan mission shot and killed her from a window of the embassy during at anti-Gaddafi demonstration which she was helping to police. The murderer got away, such are the laws that govern diplomatic immunity. It is hard not to whisper now, as I pass, “Don’t worry. He’s gone now.” If I thought that way, I would fancy that she is now sleeping more soundly.

Just next door to the ex-embassy is the house where Nancy Astor lived and entertained. It now has an “IN” painted on the left hand column of its portico and an “OUT” on the right hand. This is typical English eccentricity. I’ll tell you how it came about.

Lord Palmerston, the 19^th century prime minister, used to live in a fine mansion on the north side of Piccadilly called Cambridge House. It was so grand it that it had a carriage sweep, with one gatepost marked IN and another marked OUT to prevent collisions and assist the flow of arrivals and departures. After Palmerston’s death the house was sold and turned into a club, called the Naval and Military (not to be confused with the Army and Navy or United Services or Cavalry Club, oh no siree. This is clubland, nothing’s that simple). The Naval and Military club’s nickname, on account of the gateposts, was “The In and Out”.

Fast forward many decades and the Navy and Military moves to Number 4, the old Astor homestead in the North east corner of St James’s Square (by the way, note that it is always St James’s ­– never just St James). These new premises have no carriage drive or gateposts, but the Naval and Military painted up a completely meaningless “IN” and “OUT” either side of the front door just so that it can keep its affectionate nickname. Batty but  somehow adorable.

Even battier is the name of just one of the other clubs in St James’s Square. The East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools. I mean, what? You couldn’t make it up.

Elsewhere it’s all a bit corporate. BP have their HQ there as do Rio Tinto Zinc and other so-called “blue chip” companies. The address still has great cachet around the world.

On the north west side is Chatham House, Britain’s leading foreign office think tank. William Pitt the Elder (later Earl of Chatham) lived there. You may be familiar with the “Chatham House Rule”, a protocol agreed at meetings between politicians (or indeed businessmen or any other group of people). The rule is understood to mean: “whatever is said here can be repeated outside this room, but you can not say who said it or who was present at the meeting.” They use this phrase around the world now I believe.

But I want to concentrate your attention to the building in the north west corner, between Chatham House and the afore-giggled-at East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club.

The London Library.

The London Library is, I believe I am right in saying, the world’s largest independent lending library. Which is to say it is not affiliated to a university, it is not owned or subsidised by any local council, by government or any public body. It was founded by, amongst others, that monumental man of letters Thomas Carlyle. The list of current and past members is astonishing. Darwin, Dickens, Gladstone, Thackeray, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot … and these days members include its president Tom Stoppard, and writers like Sebastian Faulks, A. S. Byatt, Claire Tomalin, Simon Shama and, even, er, me.

You wouldn’t believe that its modest entrance (well I agree it’s a grand address, but there is a more discreet back door in Mason’s Yard behind) could reveal so remarkable and beautiful a building.

There are fifteen miles of shelves containing over a million books dating back to the very beginning of printing: you can clamber across the marvellously mysterious original 1890s catwalks and gantries or luxuriate in the light and modern Art Room. They never throw a book away and there are NO FINES! You can keep a book as long as you like or until another member asks for it, in which case a polite letter will ask if you could return it at your earliest convenience.

Art Room of the London Library © Paul Raftery

You don’t have to live in London, in fact a third of the over 7,000 members live outside the city. There’s a postal loans team who’ll send you the book you want, and there are unique internet archives (including every past edition of the Times newspaper as well as dozens of scholarly journals and databases).

One of the miracles of this unique institution is the quality of the staff. They seem to know where everything is and will hunt down what you’re after with zeal and good humour. Some of the cataloguing is inspired. The Science and Miscellaneous collection is especially highly prized. Books about Coffee, Explosives and Dreams jostle happily alongside works on Home, Duels, Yachts and Cheese.

You can bring in your laptop and find just the cranny, desk, table or sofa where it best suits you to work, study, chase ideas or dream.

The London Library is one of Britain’s best kept secrets. Because it’s private there is an annual fee, which is reduced for young people, but which I won’t pretend is a small consideration. Nonetheless the advantages are enormous and just think what a present it would make for someone you love. Subscription to a place that can become a mixture of college, West End Club, snug, den, writing room and welcoming island – and all just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus.

London Library Lightwell © London Library 2011

I know that municipal libraries are feeling the pinch horribly. Feeling the punch might be more accurate, right in the solar plexus, and of course many of us are anxious to believe that public libraries have a real future in the internet age. The London Library may seem like an elitist enclave, but actually it is just another example of what great cities can achieve over time and can keep alive with care and continuity. Its existence isn’t a threat and never has been, to public libraries, or to the great British Library in St. Pancras. It costs no more than many gyms, and what gyms can do for your body, this magical place can do for your mind.

If the subscription is beyond your reach I’m sorry to have tempted you, but maybe it won’t always be thus, and maybe you can save up or hint to an aunt or uncle… there are student prizes offered too.

Anyway. I have no vested interest in getting you to join other than the enthusiasm that anyone who enjoys something is anxious to communicate.

x

Stephen Fry

Their website is London Library and, bless them, they’re on Twitter and their Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-London-Library/198017356050 You can also Email: visits@londonlibrary.co.uk for news of free guided tours.

Buy the FT Weekend Magazine in the UK on Saturday 28th May 2011.

Read the full story this weekend at FT.com/gaga, along with a picture gallery, a transcript of the interview, and full audio version

Twenty years ago, writer Douglas Adams and the zoologist Mark Carwardine set off in search of some of the most endangered species on the planet to produce the timeless classic book Last Chance to See.

Now Stephen Fry – who by chance house-sat for Douglas while he was on his epic adventure – is realising the dream himself, as he joins Mark in what could be the final outing to capture some of these species on camera in the TV version of Last Chance to See.

Across six special weeks, Stephen will be engaging in what he calls an “exhausting, exhilarating and exasperating” journey, but one that he wouldn’t have missed for the world, as he tracks the progress of the Aye-Aye in Madagascar, the Blue Whale off the coast of Mexico, the Kakapo in New Zealand, the Northern White Rhino in Uganda, the Komodo Dragon in Indonesia and the Amazonian Manatee in Brazil.

Stephen admits that while he does love animals, he’s not so keen on the fact that to see them in the wild, one needs to spend so much of the time trekking and camping to where they are. But it’s a sacrifice he’s prepared to make to share some incredible moments – his first sight of a blue whale fluking (raising its tail vertically in the air) stirring “almost unbearable” excitement; meeting the world’s smallest primate, Madame Berthe’s Pygmy Mouse Lemur – “sheer, unadulterated cute” -  and watching tiny turtle hatchlings rushing across the sand to reach the sea – “one of the great evenings of my life”.

Although Last Chance to See introduces some rare and wonderful specimens, as with the original book and radio series, there is a serious message. Currently almost 8,500 species are officially recognised as endangered by extinction, and it’s not getting any easier as habitats continue to be destroyed, sometimes, ironically, so that we in the West can claim we’re going green.

Rainforest is being cleared to create palm plantations for bio-fuel, for example, leaving whole species without a home, and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the process. Mark says he found this particularly noticeable in Madagascar, where first time round, along Baobab Alley, the whole area was jungle – now one small strip is all that remains.

One species the pair couldn’t revisit was the Yangtse River Dolphin, now officially extinct, though Mark still has photographs from his previous encounter. And Stephen finds that sometimes it is just a few people standing between the survival of a whole species and its complete demise. Mark was cheered that in every case, people he and Douglas met 20 years ago are still there, still passionate about their cause.

In New Zealand they met up with Don Merton, who has dedicated his life to helping the Kakapo, a large flightless parrot almost wiped out when settlers introduced predators such as rats and stoats, since its primary defence, says Mark, is “to sit and wait and see what happened”. Mostly what happened was they were eaten. Just 40 remained when Mark met Don last, but with astonishing dedication and care, 90 now exist. It’s a long, slow crawl back from the brink of disaster.

Mark is delighted to find that the book is still stirring people to action. Even now, Don says, he receives notes from people saying they have just read Last Chance to See and enclose money to help save the Kakapo.

Stephen acknowledges that he is more aware than ever that a price has been paid by some animal, somewhere, that allows him to be a “creature of the modern world” and all that goes with it.

And he and Mark hope the programme will go a little way to educating people in realising what they have to lose – a big task however when it comes to species such as sharks or seahorses, which south east Asian cultures believe have health-giving properties. The pair browse a market in Borneo, where thousands of tiny seahorses are packaged up to be used in a supposedly potent broth, while Mark notes that the sharks, stripped of their fins to make soup, are rather small – indicating that all the larger ones have already been fished out. He admits it’s an uphill struggle with “one-and-a-half-billion people believing in these products”.

Stephen, who has now signed up as an ambassador for Flora and Fauna International, hopes the programme can make a difference. “Wouldn’t it be a shame, quite literally shaming, if all we leave to the people of the future are photographs in place of thousands and thousands of some of the most extraordinary, complex, baffling and sometimes hilarious creatures that ever walked upon the Earth,” he says.

For more about the series visit the comprehensive BBC Last Chance to See website

Stephen Fry explains the principles of cloud computing and recommends a few services

I first heard about the principles of what is now called the “cloud” but was then called “network computing” at a talk given many years ago by Larry Ellison. Ellison’s fortune (he is one of the richest men on the planet) came from Oracle, a leading database and “enterprise” computing company. Enterprise software and computing can be thought of as a kind of proactive intranet, a closed system that “powers” (don’t you just hate the current use of that verb?) everything from business databases to the corporate accounts of BlackBerry users.

Enterprise systems will tend to hold applications and files on servers. A server is a dedicated storage and processing computer designed transparently to handle tasks for a network of individual “client” computers, the ones humans actually use. Think of client computers as having screens and keyboards, while servers are stored in racks. The old model of computing required applications to be installed on desk/laptops, each machine an autonomous island. Bridges were built between them by disk-swapping and LAN connection. Even today, most of us will use our computers this way, but now with memory sticks instead of floppies and the internet instead of LAN. People often save data online in the ether or “cloud” simply by keeping it on their gmail or hotmail folders. How many times have you sent yourself a photo just so you can have a copy of it online? But many of us are beginning to dabble in true online applications and storage, in cloud computing. The advantage is that files can be created, stored and accessed from any online computer in the world. The network holds not only your files, but the applications that create them, while your computer is, as in the early days, little more than a dumb terminal. A stolen laptop becomes a nuisance like a lost chequebook – a bit of password changing and ringing round, perhaps, but the valuable data are stored elsewhere. We save to the cloud and only back up to our computer.

If you want to put a head in the clouds, I recommend a number of services. Google has a full online office suite, but if you feel that the big G is powerful enough, thank you, then zoho.com offers a similar, if not even richer, range. Web applications can now mimic desktop software, so the kinds of keyboard shortcuts used on your desktop spreadsheet programme, for example, are now possible on the web equivalent. For those too bohemian to be attracted by anything smelling of an office, there is jooce.com, which gives users a customisable desktop and Instant Messaging tools – worth a look just to show you how far the online virtual desktop environment can go.

Apple’s .Mac service allowed online storage for years in the shape of a virtual “iDisk” before it was recently rebranded as MobileMe (Mac or PC), which horrible name was attended by a spectacularly flaky launch. The service, now stable and working, allows contacts and calendar information as well as email to be “pushed” – in other words, arrive without you having to collect it. My PA and I each have my diary on our iPhones. When we amend an entry, the alteration more or less instantly appears on the other’s phone as well as on the MobileMe online web apps and all computers logged into the same account. There are problems: full synchronisation with Google’s more function-rich calendar relies on third-party utilities; alterations and additions are not “flagged”; the push sometimes needs a push itself in the form of a manual synchronisation, but it points to how things will be.

SugarSync.com is an online file-storage service that comes with excellent applications for iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and, shortly no doubt, Google Android. If you have coverage, you can access all the files on all your computers. They don’t even need to be online, for all is on the server, all is in the cloud.

Google, Zoho and Jooce cost nothing. MobileMe and SugarSync charge, so I suggest taking advantage of their free trial offers. Security? Ah, well, that’s a whole other ball of wax. Are your jewels safer at home or in someone else’s safety deposit box? Questions don’t get mooter.

Initials of the week

LAN Local area network. The original pre-web ‘intranet’, a localised network, typically connected by ethernet cables.