No all the far from Parliament is Downing Street the residence of the Prime Minister and Chancellor. I remember being able to walk through this street passed the famous Number 10. Now they have erected large iron gates manned daily by police. This is of course in Great Britain but I am sure it is the same elsewhere.
I have two souvenirs of barriers of history. I have a piece of the Berlin Wall, just a small section but enough to see some of the graffiti that covered the wall. This was a barrier erected to keep people in and to keep people out. My other souvenir is a section of the fence from the nuclear base in Scotland, the home of Trident. Yes in my wild youth I was known to enter such premises in some vain idea that government and the world might pull back from the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Here I am forty and more years later and they are still there and I have a little bit of fence as a poignant reminder.
I saw on the news, a scene of crime, in a graveyard. The police had stretched tape across all the entrances. Now was that to keep people out or to stop the deceased from fleeing the graveyard?
We are surrounded by barriers of all sorts supposedly for our protection. Little fences and notices warning of deep water beware. The same deep water I paddled in as a boy as I tried to catch minnows. At times we have gone mad with barriers.
But the real barriers that we need to be aware of are the barriers we create ourselves. The barriers we erect in our heads that stop us being all that we could be. Those little mind barriers that tell us we cannot do this or we cannot do that. This is too difficult or I could never do that. I was brought up being told daily that I was not going to be able to do certain things. The trouble was I often accepted the invitation to believe it. Before we erect and decorate these barriers, give it a try you might be surprised.
This blog is linked to my other blog where I discuss the artwork:-The Wall
