The picture of a man relieving himself by the boarded-up statue of Churchill, and apparently oblivious of the memorial to a London policeman murdered while protecting innocent people, might, and has been been taken, to represent deliberate disrespect for the murdered man.
However I have the perhaps outmoded idea that a person should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and conscience according to a Latin proverb has nothing to do with it.
As men get older the urgency is greater and it’s a matter of leak or bust. Younger men, such as Dominic Cummings, I’m expected to believe, can hold their water whilst driving the 260 miles from London to Durham. He might earn a mention in the Guinness Book of Records, but not as an advertisement for the brewery at Dublin’s St James’s Gate. Centuries before the 260 year old Brewery, Dubliners used set out, walking, to the shrine of St James (St Iago) in Spain, where they mixed with other Christians who had set out from all over the known world.
But researching the Latin proverb I started with Blackpool in Lancashire, where HARDHORN, together with the hamlet of Newton, together make up the Civil Parish of STAINING.
Blackpool is of course a translation of Dubhlinn and suggests one result of imbibing Dublin’s most celebrated export. Could Newton be a Town of Newts?
It appears that I may have been remiss. For my researches missed Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which might have had some relevance.
Across the Pennines, in North Street York, is a Stained Glass Window, surviving since 1410, inspired by a poem – THE PRICKE OF CONSCIENCE dating from 1340. More than 130 Manuscripts of the poem survive from the 14th Century.
Their survival borders on the miraculous through centuries of mindless iconoclasm of religious bigots and the jettisoning of conscience by hypocritical scoundrels.
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