Day 150 - Dungeon Crawler

the abyss

Is 150 posts a significant milestone?

I can't really see that it is...which is just as well, with today's photo, which harks back to an earlier, coarser period of my photographic journey. 

Oh yes, nowadays I use f-stops and everything, don'tcha know!  ;-)

Anyway, just to demonstrate that my life isn't all glitz, glamour and adventure (nor always green or red), here is a photo of a place I find myself almost daily. 

You'll recall (well, you probably won't but ya know, poetic licence and all that), that I and my team recently moved office.  The new office is newly refurbished, so it's fresh, bright and clean. 

But right behind my desk, there's a little door that leads to this dark, dank service corridor, in the bowels of the County Council Headquarters. 

Every work day, at some point I find myself stooping and creeping along here, ducking my head to avoid the pipes on the low ceiling. 

Somewhere around here are a couple of cells where condemned prisoners were put, back in the day.  40 or 50m away is the dungeon where Quakers were imprisoned, back in another day (a bit later, I think).   

So, you know, mmm, a lovely reminder of our sordid past.

Although it's not really our past, is it?   If there were a centagenarian reading this, all of this particular sordidness happened some 250 years before even he was born.  

Our Past stretches back to the early 20th century at most, and for the majority of us, much less than that.  Anything further back than that is The Past, but it's not Our Past...and to pretend that it is, somehow, Our Past, is just a foolish way of pulling irrelevant, long passed (and should've been forgotten) conflicts, grudges, problems and concerns into our collective Now...for no benefit to anyone, and risking much potential grief to many.

The Past consistently demonstrates the folly of this kind of (un)thinking, and yet we rarely take heed...

Anyway, My Past goes back to the early 60's, a mere 3 weeks after Kennedy's assassination, as it turned out.  

That particular tragedy happened in The Past, but not in My Past, thank you very much.

In the name of, I dunno, Jonny Hendrix, I hereby confess that I had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination.  

I wasn't even here, m'lud, you can't prove a thing!

B-)