Tuesday 16 August 2011

Old Lady

It's surprising what you see if you keep your eyes peeled. As I was making my way out of Victoria station this morning, part of the usual commuter throng ('I had not thought death had undone so many'), I looked up and saw a large dark moth flying - or rather blundering - around under the roof, just a few feet above the heads of the crowd. This would almost certainly be an Old Lady moth, a species that seems to like living more or less indoors and not to mind being endlessly flushed by human activity from wherever it happens to be roosting. I remember how, in my boyhood, Old Ladies used to haunt the grotto (a remnant of an over-ambitious 18th-century scheme of landscaping) in Carshalton Park. I believe they still do, but the grotto has been wire-fenced off, doubtless on health and safety grounds, so adventurous children can no longer scare themselves in its dank and mysterious depths. Ah the lost pleasure of crawling on your hands and knees in total darkness along a rubble-strewn brick tunnel, with a fine trickle of decaying mortar falling on your head. Kids today, they don't know what they're missing...

9 comments:

  1. yes the grotto certainly does look quite gothic these days Nige

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Grotto_Carshalton_Park.jpg

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  2. Damn it, I was buried under rubble many times when I was a lad and it never did me any harm. Well apart from the iffy leg. Oh and the claustrophobia. And the night terrors

    But really it is so strange how over coddling we have become. We had a spill of mercury here at the lab the other day and had 3 people in protective gear cleaning it up. When I say a spill I mean someone dropped an old thermometer. I don't know about your chemistry lessons Nige but one of our delights was getting big blobs of mercury and smacking them with text books to see how far it would scatter. Ah those dear dead highly toxic days.

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  3. Gosh, yes, I'd completely forgotten those heady mercury-bashing days! Thanks for the memory. What's your view on bicycle helmets, though? I find this one a test of mettle on the H & S front.

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  4. Oh yes, nice picture Worm - the graffiti doesn't show up too badly. None of that it my day of course - well, only in chalk...
    I don't think I ever got my hands on any mercury in chemistry lessons, alas, Banished. I suppose the teacher's repeated phosphorus disasters were sufficient entertainment. People used to take mercury in quantity as a syphilis 'cure', didn't they, so it must be good for you (Laurence Sterne included, I believe.) As for the ridiculous scare about lead - don't get me started - or I might end up on 'asbestos', then you'd be sorry...
    Bicycle helmets are a style crime in themselves, Mary - the simple solution is to ban bicycles from town. They're a menace, and the people who ride them - esp the ones with helmets - tend to be aggressively self-righteous prigs. Their main aim seems to be to run down pedestrians.

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  5. Oh, delighted to read your views on bicycle helmets, although very sorry indeed you see cyclists themselves as an H & S hazard. I cannot answer for those helmeted zealots in your southern cities, but here in the more sedate northern parts, we gentle cyclists enjoy the feel of a cool breeze in the hair. Would you consider a more discriminatory approach to a ban, along the lines of amiable unhelmeted ladies are permitted to cycle along providing their bikes are at least 35 years old, but all other riders should be banned?

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  6. Ah, the Carshalton grotto was already closed up by the time I was a Carshalton child, but we used to have a lot of fun inventing and repeating crazy stories about what might be at the end of those little tunnels - it was probably much more fun than actually crawling down there!

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  7. You're right Kate - the reality was really pretty grim, but pleasingly scary...
    And yes Mary, that sounds like an excellent basis for legislation. Cyclists of that stamp won't wage war on pedestrians.

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  8. I'll be looking out for the Old Lady of Victoria Station next time I'm passing through..

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  9. This can't work in reality, that is exactly what I suppose.

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