Man of the year

I looked up in the city centre today, and noticed a little statue in an alcove on the exterior wall of a shop, up on the first floor level. It's of a guy called Jedediah Strutt. So I researched him on the internet, and it turns out he was an 18th-century inventor who made an improvement to the process of stocking manufacture, and owned a lot of cotton mills in Belper. They'll build statues of anyone nowadays. His grandson was an MP and became the first Baron Belper, a title that apparently still exists - I should pay more attention to the local aristocracy in case I ever need to line them up against a wall when the revolution comes.

But then, there are statues of all kinds of weird people. Back in Boston, in the market place there was a great big statue of Herbert Ingram, who founded the Illustrated London News. And later drowned in the Lady Elgin disaster while on a trip to America, although that part wasn't mentioned on the statue. Which is a shame, because it's the most interesting thing he ever did. Absolutely nobody in Boston ever so much as noticed that the statue even existed, let alone knew who was on it. That's how I'd like to be immortalised - on a statue somewhere out of the way that nobody pays any attention to. That'd be cool.