Sunday, March 6, 2011

feats of balance


I'm continuing in the spirit of looking around me for things that really haven't changed in - oh, dear, this time, in something like fifty four (plus) years ...  This is the telephone exchange on Wimbledon Ridgway - a listed building, I gather, though I've not been able to make the internet cough up an actual date of construction - maybe the 1930s?   In any case, it's been there as long as I can remember - at least, as long as I can remember walking.   Because when I was very, very small I used to love walking along this little  wall - especially the bits where it went a bit higher, because then I thought I was truly brave.   And then we went up to Cumberland in early 1958, and when we returned, in 1961, I was amazed how tiny the wall seemed (though I still, occasionally, surreptitiously, scampered along it).   Now, it's as though the ground has risen up and nearly swallowed it - although empirically, of course, that just can't be.

Unlike the King of Denmark - one of the two pubs at the top of my parents' road, which has been shuttered and sad for a few years, and which has suddenly (so far as I'm concerned) disappeared into a flat sullen wilderness of clay and smashed red bricks (which has been the occasion for this sudden rush of Taking Photographs of the Few Remnants before they vanish ...) - unlike the King of Denmark, I don't think that this exchange is in any danger of imminent demise.   But the phone boxes ... ah, they are indeed a potentially vanishing species, and are clearly not treated with much respect (not, indeed, that they ever were ...).

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