Locking Piece

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously…

Henry Moore's Locking Piece, Millbank, Westminster, SW1P

…and accepting both of them.

From George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Tate Britain

To add to his intellectual repetoire, he had memorised a particular line from Paradise Lost.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

He would recite it at appropriate times to impress and secretly belittle those he was in conversation with. He had swooned over what he deemed to be “the greatest British prose by a great Briton” until one conversation with a stranger had him in high water with poetry expert.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

His lack of knowledge was exposed and he floundered, failing to tread water in a shallow sea.

Sir Luke Fildes' The Doctor, Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

His copy of Milton’s opus, untouched and dutsy at the bottom of a pile of books, was located and destoyed with an anguished abandon.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

This episode had never been mentioned again.

JMW Turner's Self Portrait, Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

But it still simmered in the depths of his mind; resurrected every time he felt diminshed or unimportant. It simmered now.

Millbank Tower

She looked at a solitary girder that jutted out of the ground and wondered why it was there. It was bent and dented, and looked slightly apologetic for its existence.

Millbank Tower, Millbank, Westminster, SW1P

She threw her head back and groaned loudly.

Girders. The most interesting thing I can think of is girders.