DISTURBING signs have emerged that the peasantry are not paying proper obeisance to their elders and betters and, indeed, to their forebears who made this country quite good.
I refer in particular to the recent desecration of the statue in George Square, Glasgow, of Victoria, former Queen of Quite Good Britain and Empress of India. Not to put to fine a point on it, rather than being seen to wield a mighty sceptre, she was made to bear aloft a brolly (open), in what was perhaps a protest against the meteorological situation in Glasgow.
The use of our statues to make such controversial points is deplorable. Queen Victoria’s sister statue in Leith is similarly disfigured on a regular basis, with the placing of a Hibs scarf round her neck. After that controversial football club’s historic Scottish Cup win last year, such a garment remained in place for many weeks and appears to have been dismissed by the Leith Police as a crime of no great gravity.
In a further sinister parallel, indicative of unusual collaboration between the two great cities of Lower Scotland, the equestrian statues of the Duke of Wellington in both Glasgow and Edinburgh are frequently subject to the placing of parking cones on their crania.
As a result, the Duke, who saved Britain from a mad, one-armed Corsican, is now referred to in common parlance as Old Cone-Head. I cannot think that the great general would have won the Battle of Waterloo had he ridden into battle with a parking cone on his head. Nobility, it seems, is not much valued nowadays. While the far-seeing eyes of these bronze historic personages remain fixed on greater goals than a steak-bake from Greggs, drunkards conceive demeaning japes, and passing mutts cock their legs for a pee against the plinth.
Recently, as you might imagine, I have been making a study of the statuary of ancient Rome, and have discerned that the bronze beasties were placed throughout the Empire as a means of uniting the multi-cultural citizenry and reminding them who was in charge.
They were a source of excitement – my own controversial researches suggest that Romans did not have the internet – and, if you are tittering at that, consider that the situation was not so different here until relatively recently. When the George Square statue of Victoria was unveiled in 1854, enormous crowds arrived from all the airts and even some of the pairts. Weeks beforehand, Punters One and Two (everyone was known by numbers in those days) might have said to each other: “Gawn tae the inauguration o’ the statue?” “Aye, whole family’s gawn.” “It’ll be great.” “Aye, lookin forrit tae it.”
What these blessed simpletons would make of today’s sacrileges does not bear thinking about. So we will not think. We will instead observe that a measure of our progress today is that, by and large, we only erect statues to football players and cartoon characters.
Does any decent ratepayer really think that Lobey Dosser, sitting astride two-legged Elfie, would have defeated the doolally desperadoes of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo? Or that a mighty empire might have been maintained by Jinky Johnstone nutmegging the Mahdi at Khartoum?
I think not. And I make this plea to the nation’s esteemed and sadly numerous drunkards: show a little respect, please. Britain was not led to quite goodness by leaders wearing traffic ephemera upon their nappers nor yet football regalia around their necks. Bear in mind: these bronze icons will still be standing proudly on their plinths long after you have gone, and while my bonce remains moribund in a state of misplaced cryogenic optimism. Even with bases dampened by canine micturition, the statues of the great and good stand eternal, symbols of solid, unwavering obstinacy and of a time when it was deemed glorious to be British and not, as today, faintly embarrassing and suggestive of peculiarity.
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