Footprints in the sands of time

That by which we are remembered

Introduction

This week saw the vanity publication of Tony Blair’s Journey setting out how he’d like to be remembered. Sadly it is posterity that does the remembering and not us, so I’ve penned a few jottings on how some people get remembered.

Enjoy!

Longfellow

In the poem A Psalm of Life, Longfellow said (amongst other things):

Lives of great men all remind us
     We can make our lives sublime,
 And, departing, leave behind us
     Footprints on the sands of time;

I like this particular verse which I found not only an a statue to Baden Powell (his legacy being the scouting movement) but is (here’s the dodgy cross-reference) the introduction to the song Assault and Battery by Hawkwind (any regular reader will have spotted this blog’s dreadful bias to the mighty Hawks).

In other cases (and I suggest Blair is one) our legacy is less obvious. Now there are many cases where legacies are obvious – Shakespeare’s plays being one, but many are not. For example, how many people realise that one of Florence Nightingale’s legacies would be the widespread adoption of the pie chart?!

All this inevitably led me to the Monty Python boys and wondering what their legacy might be? After all they went to Cambridge and these things are important to an old lamppost in a field.

And now for something completely different!

So, what will the legacy be? Votes for dead parrots? Maybe the monster raving loony party? Does anyone expect the Spanish Inquisition?

Well, I strongly believe that the Python legacy is already here, and I ignore the silly walk and give you one more clue – it’s embedded in the Internet, and it give you the reader problems regularly. Any guesses?

The answer is… Spam, yes good old Internet junk mail which takes its name from the excessive mentions of the word spam in the Monty Python Bloody Viking’s in a greasy spoon sketch. So, all together now…

"Spam, spam, spam, spam,
Spam, spam, spam, spam.
Lovely spam, wonderful spam!"

Repeat ad nausea – that much spam will make anyone sick!

Advertisements