Pulled a Bullingdon at Vauxhall Cross and then across Vauxhall Bridge, from where one could view the inflatable and semi-submersible hippopotamus moored just upstream of the bridge, presumably part of the same art project which once gave us a herd of brightly coloured model elephants. All good fun and, as far as I am concerned, a great deal better than pickling bovine body parts for our inspection. Or even ovine body parts.
On to get rather lost at Victoria, where ripping out a block opposite the station has resulted in much confusion, at least for me. And which on this occasion resulted in my passing a stand at the Queen Mother Sports Centre, cycling round the ripped out block at Victoria, not to find a stand on the way, and then going back to the Sports Centre to park up. Walked back to Victoria to find that the second treasure, Baby Ben, seems to have had to make way for the same redevelopment. The site of many a rendez-vous in the past, so I hope that it gets reinstated in due course.
On to the third treasure at the top of the Duke of York steps, the grave of Ribbentrop's dog. A grave granted, it seems, by the bounty of the then Queen Mother in 1938. Which struck me as rather odd; a lapse of Royal Judgement, assuming, that is, that there ever was any. To which the riposte was that we might not like Ribbentrop, to the point of hanging him six years later, but there was no need to take it out on his dog, which still deserved decent burial.
I then start to wonder about who exactly does deserve decent burial. The burial places of most people vanish into oblivion after, say, fifty or a hundred years, which is fine and proper as far as I am concerned. But those of other people might get more permanent memorials, mausoleums even (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/captain-mausoleum.html), although there are exceptions as I seem to recall that Atilla the Hun went to some considerable trouble and expense to make sure that his last resting place was unknown, unvisited and unviolated, to the extent of temporarily diverting a river while he was buried in its bed and then killing off all the chaps that did it so that they did not live to tell the tale. Maybe a yarn from 'Decline and Fall'?
One angle is that any human being should be buried decently, however awful they might have been in life. Another is that one does not want to bury bad people in such a way that their burial places could become shrines for the next generation of bad people. I guess the answer is that it all depends on the mood of the times.
And so onto the last treasure, Stanfords, not the quaint old-world place that it once used to be, but still the best place for maps in town. I still like maps in books - atlases - and maps on folded paper, maps which meet needs for me which are not met by maps on computers, despite the fine service offered by the likes of google maps. But I suppose I shall have to move on one day as the likes of google maps have taken a great bite out of the demand for paper maps, which will eventually go into some downward, possibly terminal, spiral.
Pulled the second Bullingdon of the day from William IV Street and cycle from thence off to Waterloo Bridge. Picked up a leaflet from some JW's (http://www.jw.org/en/) at the station, of which more in due course. And so home.
PS: I find this morning that the Queen Mother in question was named for a small castle in Germany, now a restaurant, which may have contributed to the lapse. See http://www.burg-teck-alb.de/.
No comments:
Post a Comment