Here’s the kind of thing you don’t read every day. In fact I read it in the Evening Standard on January 12thand have been waiting to hear further developments, but as far as I can tell there haven’t been any.
There in the paper, along with the above picture, was the headline ‘Crumbling Justice’ and the sub-headline ‘Pedestrian hurt after old Bailey Masonry Crashes into the Street Below.’
From this you and I would imagine a someone was walking down the street, and a lump of stone fell off the building from a great height and hit the walker below, But then you read the article (by Tristan Kirk, who I think also took the pictures), and it reads, ‘A member of the public was hospitalised after masonry over the “decaying” historic entrance to the Old Bailey crumbled and crashed into the street below.
‘No one was hurt when the stone fell from the building, but a pedestrian was injured after tumbling over debris on the pavement before the area had been cordoned off.’
Am I wrong to be disappointed by this? Walking along and being hit by an unidentified falling object has a lot of drama, maybe even cosmic drama, this kind of thing:
But tripping over a lump of stone that’s lying on the ground, really lacks grandeur. The fallen piece doesn’t even look to have been very big. The little white bit on the statue in the picture below is where it fell from.
Interestingly it seems to me, the pedestrian is not named in the news item. I wonder if the journalist was sparing his or her blushes. I don’t mean to mock this or any other pedestrian but falling over in the street and ending up in hospital is pretty hopeless and humiliating. I know because I’ve done it. And there wasn’t even a lump of masonry to trip over.
