mostly david ephgrave

On Friday I climbed up the Elizabeth Tower at the Palace of Westminster, more commonly known as Big Ben. (In case you don't know what it looks like.) I went up the inside, not the outside, by the way; I’m no Peter Duncan. While I once took part in a circus-skills workshop led by him at the Gordon Craig Theatre as a child, we didn’t cover how to cling to a massive clock face. If we had, I’d have shimmied up Stevenage Clock Tower like a shot. I was surprised by how small it was on the inside, like a TARDIS in reverse. It confused me how something that dominates the skyline and public consciousness could be so compact. I’m not saying you can fit it in your pocket, but its relatively slight scale was marked; particularly when you walk around the inside of the faces. The tour is planned impeccably. It’s done tightly, to a stopwatch. We’d left Portcullis House reception at 9:10am and by 9:15, we were a third of the way up. We were in the ...