There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [79]
So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit wild places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. And if it could happen then it could happen now or any time, because there is a historical precedent, which is not the same as President Obama which is a different spelling though also a precedent of president at the same time! which is quite cool and witty when you think about it THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST
the fact is, actually, it is okay to be clever. It is more than okay, to. It is cleverist, to be. Brooke Bayoude: Cleverist. CLEVERIST. So all these people here today looking at Greenwich, London, and thinking that history is past and over, that all it is is grass mounds in the ground where the Anglo Saxon men were buried once with all the shields and the music of the spears, should look again. Just look! It is called the Observatory here after all! ha ha! There is a picture of a man at the front of the telescope book at home. The man who is from the year 1660 has his whole body covered in eyes that are open. There is an eye on his foot and an eye on his knee. There are some all up his leg and his arm, and one on his shoulder, one on his wrist and one on his hand. The hand with an eye on it is pointing at the sky, where another hand, without an eye on it, is coming out of a kind of cloud of light and words are coming out of the fingers of the upper hand. The upper hand! Joke. The man who is looking at the word-hand has open eyes on his stomach even. The eyes cover him like butterflies would if butterflies ever landed all over you all at once. Imagine if your whole body was covered in butterflies and the butterflies were eyes, opening and closing their wings like eyelids and all seeing at the same time at different heights and angles. Would we see things from all their different sides at once? Would that make what we see have a different dimension inside our brains? In that telescope book there is also a picture of a Greenwich pensioner sailor from the old days hiring out his telescope to people and underneath the picture it says that probably the people are so keen to look through it because he has it pointed at Execution Dock. Because people actually paid money to a pensioner sailor to watch somebody be executed through a telescope! A person on Execution Dock would probably be being hanged, not guillotined, because the guillotine was not used in England although there was a way to execute called the Halifax Gibbet in England in history which was a bit like the guillotine. The point of the guillotine was that it was used so people would have a clean and quick death. It was popular in France, and 16,500 people were historically executed on one in what is now Europe where you go on the Eurostar to, in the 1930s and 1940s, though not since as far