As with most Britons alive today, there hasn’t been a change of the UK’s Sovereign in my lifetime. Not any more. I don’t follow that branch of the entertainment industry known as ‘The Royals’ and I have no particular affection for its various actors.
If there was going to be a memorial statue for David Bowie then Aylesbury might seem an odd, out-of-the-way place for it. Why not Brixton, where he was born, or Bromley, where he was formed, or Soho, where he was transformed? The connection goes back to the early 1970s when, despite its traditional-market-town identity, Aylesbury had a thriving music scene.
Carters Steam Fair was in town and I went to have a look, impelled by a faint nostalgia. And what nostalgia remained was more for the experience of fair-going than the attractions themselves.
When John Keats was dying, he asked that the inscription on his gravestone read, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. His wish was honoured and the gravestone can be seen in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.