Genius Fan

If you sit at a table on the terrace outside Paul, the French cafe behind St Paul’s Cathedral, London, you can easily daydream away thirty minutes gazing into the relocated Temple Bar monument. The two storey stone…edifice (I’m trying not to repeat the word ‘monument’), was London’s principal entrance from Westminster to the ancient City of London. It was designed by the great English architect Sir Christopher Wren, completed in 1672, and its original site was where The Strand and Fleet Street meet. Two centuries later, in 1878 it was dismantled to allow the widening of the road, and the structure was sold and rebuilt at a country estate in Hertfordshire. The story doesn’t end there, of course. The stones were purchased, brought back to London and in 2004 the entire Temple Bar was once again standing – only this time in Paternoster Square, London, a ten minute walk from its first site. That’s where you’ll find it today and it’s wonderful to look at.

Stare at the monument long enough, you can do this if there aren’t too many tourists at the cafe, and you’ll start your daydream. This is aided if you know your Boswell’s London Journal, because the 1950 McGraw-Hill edition features a dustcover showing Boswell and Johnson standing just thirty feet away from it. Its a wonderful illustration. But intrusive thoughts being what they are, intrusive, I lost my Eighteenth century reverie and ended up imagining a version of the 1985 movie Bridge Across Time, in which David Hasselhoff plays a detective chasing a time travelling Jack the Ripper who’s brought back to life under supernatural circumstances, at the site of…wait for it…the old London Bridge, which had been dismantled and shipped to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, USA. And that was me, imagining my own time travelling story featuring the Temple Bar as a portal for time and space travel. Something similar to Stargate. Oh, dear, he’s off again.