Anniversary Address

Extract

‘What's not devoured by Time's devouring hand?

Where's Troy, and where's the Maypole in the Strand?’

That couplet is not, I need scarcely tell you, a contemporary one; it was written by the Reverend James Bramston in the eighteenth century. However, in the predicament now facing our heritage the title of the work might well suggest contemporaneity: it is The Art of Politics. And in the present climate of cuts, economies and withdrawal of grants to worthy causes, I might add my own doggerel:

There's every indication that the State

Resorting in extremity to Fate,

Whose way it is to ravage and destroy,

Would Schedule scarce a hectare of Troy

Or, even less, would lend a ready hand

To Designate the Maypole in the Strand.