Monday 2 June 2008

A View

On Saturday I had lunch in the restaurant at the top of the National Portrait Gallery. We had a window table, looking over Trafalgar Square.

From this vantage point you notice that Nelson's Column is surely the most purely absurd monument in Europe, and doubtless in the World Top Ten. Why exactly did they make it SO high? The base of the statue, set on this ludicrous maypole - and allegedly quite a good likeness, as if anyone but helicopter pilots could possibly know - is well above the tops of the restaurant windows, which look down on the gallery's dome.

In South Asia, as I was saying to an Indian colleague, they would be more honest about these things, and couples who wanted children would sit on the lions and kiss.

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