Marley is dead. Dead as a Dickensian doorknocker. Down the hill from where I live, a short trot eastwards from the Greenwich meridian, however, the Millennium Dome is alive and well, about to open for business. With this giant step for Mankind and New Labour the Greenwich of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Drake, Pepys and Wolfe (that's the General, thank you very much) at last achieves partial parity with Anaheim and Orlando.
The Greenwich, too, of Inigo Jones and Wren. Since first revealing its design the domesters have described it as — what else? — “an elegantly functional solution.” Hmmn. The best means, they mean,  the men in suits, of covering the mostest with the cheapest. Unless I wrong them. I suppose there are hostesses who truly believe that to spike the rim of a heaped bowl of cottage cheese with breadsticks is to create a matchless centerpiece for the cook-out salad table, for such a masterpiece our dome resembles.
Judge not by exteriors. Elegance may be more than skin deep. Inside the Dome, in the Greenwich of Halley and Herschel, a series of zones celebrate the Ascent of Man and triumphantly outline the shape of things to come. See — yonder reclines the giant body of a human being, its vital interior organs humming with virtually real working parts. Really. Like little corpuscles, or whatever, you and I can pass right through it in — such an original concept — an incredible journey. Honest! When we emerge a cornucopia of sophisticated electronic games, fast food, men on flying trapezes and statistics await us. Why, all Civilization is our oyster! That dome must be, however fake, our pearl!
Some good may be detected. Decades old toxic wasteland has been decontaminated. That prime object of all administrations, job creation, has been temporarily achieved. When the acrobats finally steal away, the real estate will remain for recycling as a sports arena, Britain's first and the world's last rain forest, commodity broker car parking. At least the need to ferry the world's tourists across to London's least accessible square mile has finally obliged a government to extend a decent subway out through the poor, voter insignificant districts of the East End.
At what price all this glory nobody can now compute. Hundreds of millions. But as the seconds of the old century tick away into the first of the new I shall watch the magnificent fireworks bejeweling the skies above the Thames and the Heath outside my front door and wonder how many kidney machines might have been vouchsafed our cash-strapped hospitals, how many Central African children's lives might have been saved had the monies been spent in a manner truly worthy of celebration. I shall think of the vanishing ozone layer and polar caps and my Scrooge thoughts will adapt a prayer from the original Tiny Tim. “God help us, every one.” |
