Excessive wonder…

I heard about this wonder on the radio the other evening and it excited me so much that I decided to post about it and spread the word.

Now of course this means delaying my post about the standing stone that I heard humming at the weekend (yes humming - either electrical resonance or Radio Hilversum I think) but she’s such a surreal marvel - or at least she will be - that I just had to tell you about her in case you haven’t already heard.

To be honest though my stone and Northumberlandia, as she’s called, have quite a lot in common. To somebody not in the know they both seem so mysterious, so open to a world of wondering. Even to people in the know, like me, they both seem so wonderful. Mysteriously it really does remain a wonderful life.

Yes, I know I’m going on a bit but just as I wonder about that standing stone, (the one you have yet to read about, the one that hums in thunderstorms) I wonder what people will think of Northumberlandia in a few thousand years.

What will they think she is?

I wonder if archaeologists will wonder why those bonkers ancient English people (the ones that drove around in motorised wheeled vehicles in the latter stages of the Oil Age) created the largest replica of the human body ever to be seen on Earth.

I wonder if, as they look down from their orbiting cities in space and see her in all her glory, they’ll wonder just what was this reclining female figure a quarter of a mile long and weighing 1.5 million tons was all about? What was she for? Was she a temple, a burial mound, an offering to an Earth Goddess deity? Or perhaps that they’ll think her a pointer, a sign for those aliens from the stars, and I wonder if they’ll have turned up by then? Maybe they’ll even be in those orbiting space cities cohabiting.

Yes, I know I’m still going on a bit so if you really need to know the details:

In reality she’s simply a way of blocking out the mess of mining activity behind her, a screen if you like, and she’s made from slag from the mine. Yes, something beautiful is coming from the temporary destruction of the landscape, something positive and rather wonderfully in these times of cuts - she it isn’t costing the public a penny despite her costing almost two million quid to create. She’s funded privately without even a Lottery grant.

Her designer, Charles Jencks, calls her a ‘gateway’ and an ‘abstraction’. I call her a marvel of recycling, legislation, courage, vision, beauty and one hell of a surrealist statement. The very Dali himself could only be impressed I think.

Yes, those people in the future - I wonder if they’ll wonder about her like I wonder about that standing stone. Either way, one thing is for certain, she’s going to be wonderful - a real wonder of the world.