Remember me?

The above is a detail from a 1722 engraving which I am selling on eBay right now (if you really want it) and depicts William Stukeley (?) surveying a pre-historic mound in Kent, as drawn by Stukeley himself. I just thought that this detail makes a nice picture in itself, without all the rest of the tonnage of stone and earth.

There he is, doing what thousands of others have done before and since, simply standing, staring and wondering what the f*** it is all about.

There is this tantalisingly remote yet tangible familiarity with the scene - something to do with being human - which I cannot quite put my finger on, so expect this post to be even more rambling than normal.

Jerusalem - "And did those feet..." sort of sums up the mundane but wondrous possibility that the man himself trudged around our back yard like we do, the rain fell on his head and his Rolls-Royce was just as likely to break down as ours is. Personally, I think it was the monks of Glastonbury Abbey which put about this rumour, in an early attempt at promoting tourism.

There are vast areas of land around the countryside where hundreds of men died in bloody battles, but only the fear of forgetting about them keeps them vividly dead. The poppies would still grow there, with or without our help.

The more the well-trodden path grows over through neglect, the more abstractly melancholy it becomes. On the other hand, once those withered bunches of flowers in the middle of town have been collected and thrown away by the cleaners, we walk past accident black-spots without a second thought.

Everyone who dies gets five minutes of fame.

There you are - I told you this would be rambling. Nice picture, though.