Blue

You don’t see many bowler hats these days. Relics of the of the City banker, marchers in Northern Ireland on the TV sometimes, but generally a garment of the past. A surprise then when someone stopped to stand next to me, the tap of metal-tipped shoes having alerted an approach, and the hard rim of the classic felt chapeau edging into my peripheral vision.

I took my photo of the blue plaque, another ticked off my list of London’s memorials to the great and the good and the often bad, lowered my phone and turned slowly to take in the bowler and what stood almost to attention below it. An elderly gent, late-seventies, his face looking up to the plaque, with neat, trimmed white hair jutting from his black dome. My eyes traced the figure further down – immaculate white raincoat belted tight, razor-pressed flannel trousers and the most dazzling pair of black brogues, shined to perfection.

As the Capital hummed around us, I turned back to the plaque and we continued to stand, heads raised, for what seemed a considerable amount of time, holding our silence. Two strangers fixed on the proof that a famous man had once lived at this very white-walled town house, still as elegant as when it was built almost two hundred years ago. A highly-respectable residence for those of money and importance, just like the celebrated inventor who had moved into the place eighty- three years after it had been completed and who was now immortalised in blue above the wide, red front door. The same one he had entered and left on an almost daily basis until he suddenly upped and quitted for a more countryfied pile in deepest Hertfordshire some eleven years before his celebrated murder at the hands of a close friend over some argument concerning patents. The murderer was duly hanged, his name forgotten, yet the inventor’s name and creations had gone on to reap even greater world-wide acclaim than he had ever gained whilst alive. The blue plaque a lasting testament to his achievements and impact even on the modern life we enjoy today.

Finally, the mutual peace between us was broken. A voice under the bowler spoke in a quiet, cultured tone which wouldn’t have been out of place spoken by a BBC radio announcer decades ago.

‘Great man. A genius they say’.

I kept my eyes on the plaque. ‘Yes, read a book on him once.’

‘So, he lived here then…’

‘According to this. Twenty years. All those inventions…’

‘My Great Grandfather killed him you know. Cut his throat. Always had a soft spot for my dear-departed relative…’

As I twisted my stare from the blue, the shiny shoes were tap-tapping away from me, the outline of the bowler standing out against the red of a double-decker bus passing in the street. Black against the colour of blood.