pumpkinstrokemarrow

Incongruous, but not bad. In fact rather good. Sinking large amounts of money into artefacts which cost nothing and do no harm, but which convey status, is no bad thing. A wedge of dosh moves from one moneyed person to another. Various people get some employment out of the transaction. One has not diverted productive resources down some gold plated plug hole. Much better than ruining the country to build some palace. Or tent. Or stadium

It also prompts the idea for yet another MPhil. One could do a study into the relation between the prices an early edition of a book fetches, the size of the academic industry built on the author of the book, the number of people that buy the later editions of the book and the number of people that read it for pleasure, all the way through. This book would score very highly on the first three counts but I am not so sure about the fourth.

And talking of palaces, today we have been to Nonsuch House Mark II to inspect a very handsome model of Nonsuch House Mark I. A model lovingly crafted by http://www.modelhouses.co.uk/ for the modest sum of £40,000. Now it was a very handsome model and I was very pleased to see it. But I am not sure that this was a very good use of resources, certainly not a very good use of local authority resources in these difficult times, although as it happens I think that the funding was private or charitable. However, while it will be on permanent display, it will not be on permanent display in the sort of proper museum which is open 7 days a week, which will reduce the value added. Reduce the number of school parties which can come on some project built around the thing - assuming, that is, that teachers still bother with that kind of history.

A thing which, along with other palaces of the day, does indeed seem to have been something of a folly. Built to get one over the King of France, but both the relevant King of England and the relevant King of France were dead before it was finished and it was only 100 years or so after that before the thing was broken up for the building materials. So stones which had been taken from Merton Priory in one century, found another new home in the next.

So a folly of a folly. A first.