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Oh, she said. That sort of ring. I thought you meant a ring for a finger, like a wedding ring or a gold ring. My eyes filled with tears and she saw. Why are you crying? she said. Don’t cry. Your sort of ring is much better than those. It went, I said. It’s gone. Ah, she said. Is that why you’re crying? But it hasn’t gone at all. And that’s why it’s better than gold. It hasn’t gone, it’s just that we can’t see it any more. In fact, it’s still going, still growing. It’ll never stop going, or growing wider and wider, the ring you saw. You were lucky to see it at all. Cause when it got to the edge
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Well, when you’ve nothing –, my mother said. It was what she always said : when you’ve nothing at least you have all of it :
And I find it pretty interesting that the only reason we know that the painter who did that wall existed, even lived at all, is that he asked for more. Like Oliver Twist, George says. Her mother smiles. In some ways, she says. What was his name? George says. Her mother screws up her eyes. You know, I knew this, George, I did know. I read it when we were at home. But right now I can’t remember it, her mother says. We came all this way to see a picture you like that much but you can’t remember the name of the man who did it? George says.
History is horrible. It is a mound of bodies pressing down into the ground below cities and towns in the unending wars and the famines and the diseases, and all the people starved or done away with or rounded up and shot or tortured and left to die or put up against the walls near castles or stood in front of ditches and shot into them. George is appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over.
And did you know (you probably did) that Rosalind Franklin nearly didn’t get credited for the double helix discovery? Though she took the original X-ray that meant Crick and Watson could make their discovery, and was clearly on the way to the same discovery herself. And that when Watson saw her giving a talk about her research he thought she ought to have been warmer and more frivolous in her lecture about diffraction (!) and that he might have been more interested in what she was saying if she’d taken off her glasses and done something with her hair.
