Statues

Welcome to the May mind of Davidson, Dear Friends. Who knows which aimless meander it will visit this month? Minds are like that aren’t they. Just when we think we have a grip, we have produced a specific, have charted an immediate plan, cobbled together a distant future, then our mind which has been so focussed, so concentrated, so cyclopean then it suddenly gives common sense a body swerve. It finds a tangent where there shouldn’t be one, its eyes are pulled left fieldish and suddenly we are in thoughts which have no rhyme or reason.  Our ideas are suddenly a rusty old towel rail on top of the scrap metals at the local dump. Thus it was on a bright sunny Spring day here in North Vancouver when Davidson  suddenly  and strangely thought of statues!

Apart from providing a toilet for pigeons what good is a statue?  One of the key rules for putting up a statue is that the last person who should vote for it, push for it, decide on it is the person who is to be honoured. Nobody who has a ‘guid conceit o’themsels’, as they say in Scotland, should push for his or her own glory. That is for others to do. After all the statues of Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Ceaucescu  and other such nasties of the 20^th Century are now melted into the annals, maybe even anals, of history where they belong.

Seated on a bench in a rain shower with a breeze blowing and eating an increasingly soggy egg sandwich, I decided that I needed to put up my umbrella and walk.  Behind me was the modern building of the Scottish Parliament in front of me was the historic Holyrood House, home of royalty over the years.  It was an area of Edinburgh which had become increasingly familiar to me. I resolved to walk up the Royal Mile while I waited for my good friend, Audrey, to finish her working day.  The Royal Mile is certainly a tourist attraction. It is a strange mixture of the garishly modern and the historically old. There are tourist shops in abundance, a plethora of plaid, post cards, paraphernalia  for every occasion, a Christmas decoration to remind of a trip, tartan boxes of fudge and shortbread, frisky wee whiskies. All screaming to the far flung and envious that the carrier has indeed jet setted to Scotland and boasted, “See I have proof.”. But for all its touristy tomfoolery, Dear Reader, the buildings remain old with grime reflective of a time when Edinburgh was indeed ‘Auld Reekie’ and the enlightened “Athens of the North”. So  I knew that there was no point in going to the famed Castle at this time of day and so resolved to make it to one statue, pay it my respects and head back down the hill.

There are statues in museums in Germany which were rightly torn down after the demise of Nazism, there is the Colston statue that used to dominate the centre of Bristol until it famously was riotously dumped into the dockland waters because the man was a slave trader.  There is the statue of Saddam Hussein,  wrenched from its pedestal in Baghdad with the chaotic scene of a freed people beating it with their sandals.  There is the iconic edifice of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow which is now officially allowed to have a cone on its head, (See banner photograph), a council recognition of Glaswegian humour which has been there for years. That to me is a great statue because it has been put there to honour and respect some famous person from history and the best way to honour and respect them without pulling them down is to blot arrogance with a tongue-in-the-cheek gesture. Hats, but not cones, off to the people of Glasgow.  There is Trafalgar Square where a short one armed, one eyed sailor sits atop a very tall column. The inference to me is that Nelson is such an iconic hero that he is out of reach of the rest of us. The man had a monumental confidence, a monumental ego and truly monumental column.  There is a square of statues outside Westminster Abbey. Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Millicent Garrett Fawcett the suffragetist. The poet, Robbie Burns, has a statue here in Stanley Park and in his native Dumfries, of course, as well as some 60 more of him dotted around the world. These are people recognised for their timeless contribution to something, possibly geniuses in their fields, quite possibly of singular focus.  Not one of them, Dear Reader, is without their flaws.  Some of their faults I could not name without a bit of research but I know they have them, we all do. Why? Because they and we are human.  The only way, it seems to me, to make a statue of an human being pure and perfect is to make it anonymous. Tombs of the unknown soldier do that.

 Spean Bridge does that. There stands the famous statue of three commandos overlooking the Great Glen in Scotland. They are anonymous and representative of all the men who trained there in the Second World War. I have been there on several occasions. On one such Spring morning I was wandering around the tribute area where individuals are honoured. There are old photographs protected from the elements by laminated coverings,  messages and remembrances of love for those who did not return. I was standing looking down on one such picture of a young soldier when I was surprised when a hand reached in and grabbed his photograph.  Righteous indignation was starting to bubble when the gentleman in question caught my eye and explained what he was doing.  The picture was of his father whom he never knew because he was killed in action in France. He was merely adding tributes to his memorial. This fatherless baby was watched over and cared for by his Dad’s best mate from the war. His Dad’s comrade looked out for him growing up and helped out the single mum whenever he could. That was the sort of human story which brought meaning and life to the statue in the best of ways.

Back to my walk up the Royal Mile.  I was ruminating about why this statue which I was about to visit may be the most important of all of the statues that vaunt their presence through town squares, city centres, sides of mountains, village greens. I decided that a short life which it was, a consistent life which never wavered, a loyal life which was devoted every minute of every day to one person should be honoured.  Beyond all this it represented love, a love  of the highest and purest integrity.  The weather remained dreich, it pattered on my umbrella when I eventually found myself standing before Greyfriars Bobby. He was a ‘wee dug’ , a Skye Terrier, who sat on his master’s grave for 14 years after his death until his own demise.  And now he sits on a pedestal for all to pass, an uplifting story with absolutely no human failings lurking in the shadows. Nothing there for the more cynical of us to ‘yes but’ at his heroism.  He was a dog, take him for all and all. We shall look upon his like again and, indeed, we do so every day.

Sometimes when we find a personality with whom we feel a bond, we have a tendency to overlook their faults.  We see in them all that we want to see.  We give ourselves the gift of a hero and in the process sweep their faults under an increasingly dusty carpet. When that happens we need to give ourselves a kick, bring ourselves up short and  look into our own characters.

“When we ourselves scarcely know who we are, how can we tell them who they are?”  John Le Carre

A life fully lived will have its share of Jekyll and Hyde. There will be moments that we wish we could take back, decisions which will have hurt others.  We, Dear Friends, are not the statuesque few who somehow find themselves circling the Earth on dubious pedestals and besmirched sanctity.  They are ethereal but we know that often the greatest genius has the biggest flaws. Like you, Dear Reader, I do not like it when my heroes fall from grace, blacken their purity with a behaviour or a point of view which becomes an important part of their legacy.  At times like that it takes the simplicity and honesty and the loyalty of a dog to ‘help the heart of man to know itself’.  Greyfriars Bobby did not win the battles of Waterloo or Trafalgar, did not bring apartheid to an end, did not gain the vote for women, nor write some of the finest poetry in any language but maybe, just maybe, he gave us something greater.

Thanks for reading.