pumpkinstrokemarrow

Back to Epsom Common for once in a while, for an anticlockwise turn around the all weather part, excluding the Wells loop but including the Wheelers Lane loop. I am pleased to say that I saw no signs of chain saw activity although there was an important notice pinned to a tree which may have been threatening something of the sort. Whoever provided the Chainsaw Volunteers with a laminator has a lot of arboreal litter to answer for. But the Volunteers had chopped down a patch of bracken and the cows were back on the case, spraying global warming into the summer sky.

I was reminded of my mother explaining to me that the commies often got their way on boring committees (this was in the early sixties of the last century when otherwise respectable people could still be commies) because no one else could be bothered to turn out for them. In the same way, our Chainsaw Volunteers get away with murder, in this case of trees, because not enough people are willing, able or otherwise competent to turn up for their committees and vote them down.

I then got to pondering about the renovation of the Moore sculpture which has been missing from Hyde Park for quite some years now, a sculpture which, as it happens I used to be quite fond of. A pondering which was prompted by reading that the renovation had been completed and the sculpture reinstated. It seems that, like capitalism, the statue had been in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, in this case literally as the creviced white limestone which Moore had used for his material, while pretty, was not very suitable for his design. So the renovators stuck it all back together with an internal, invisble network of stainless steel rods or some such.

Now my father used to propagate a theory that true beauty lay in the successful alignment of structure with function, a beauty which he was accustomed to see in the results of evolution, for example in teeth, his speciality. But in the case of this sculpture the structure was not aligned with the function and is only so aligned now by subterfuge. The sculpture does not work as a piece of stone and is flawed for that reason. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to let the pieces lie where they fell, assuming that they would have eventually fallen. Being a Royal Park they should have been able to wangle an exemption from the various Health & Safety edicts which such a proceeding would no doubt have contravened.