The first properly hot, dry day in town after so much rain, so the insects are out in force. Walking down Dartmouth Park Hill today, the pavements are crawling with ants, flies, and indeed flying ants.
I pass by the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, currently hosting Anthony Gormley’s hourly parade of Britons. The woman up there at this hour is an entirely ordinary-looking thirty-ish lady dressed in casual summer clothes, smiling while chatting on her mobile phone. I guess she’s calling her mates (‘I’m on the plinth’). In contrast to those who make big statements, raise worthy awareness, hire wacky costumes or treat the plinth like Britain’s Got Talent, I realise she is closest to the spirit of Mr Gormley’s idea: an unfussy celebration of everyday contentment, simply taken out of the crowd and put on display. It’s surreal in its sheer real-ness.
I read EM Forster’s sci-fi novella from 1909, The Machine Stops. Startling to think that the author of Howard’s End and Room With A View predicted virtual reality and the internet era, albeit as a warning against dependency on technology. He doesn’t quite get email right, though: letters have been replaced by ‘the pneumatic post’. The lady on the Plinth is the counter-argument to Mr Forster’s story: she clearly has a certain amount of dependency on her mobile phone, but it facilitates her first-hand life, rather than replaces it. One assumes she will meet the people she calls at some point.
(All of which says rather more about me than it does her. I do have a mobile phone, and it’s something of a lifeline when away from home. But when back in London I rarely use it, even switching it off for days on end. I realise it is me that is the strange one.)
Tags: EM Forster, London, The Fourth Plinth
