Walking to the Saatchi and Idea 149 is Property

Part of the Saatchi Paper Exhibition

On Wednesday I met a friend who I had worked with at Euronews (in France), it is something of a mild phobia of mine that with the passing of time people will have changed such that I do not immediately recognise them- this worry has yet to be fulfilled.
Strangely much of our conversation was around the subject of memory and for me it brought into focus the importance of personal and collective memory/memories.
In many ways now we have collectively 'dumped' our responsibilities of memory first to the  printed libraries and then to recorded voice and media ahead of the digitization which has put so much in the cloud (ort is that just a marketing term?)
So it was for me that even in the 60s the requirement to memoriser large chunks of anything (poems, speeches historical data) had all but gone - is this a loss? Is the brain a muscle that requires exercising and flexing?
And what are we that sets us apart from animals and computers other than  the sum of memories individual and collective ?

Hang Feng's Floating City

During my time with my former colleague we walked some distance through west London from Exhibition Road to Covent Garden - I was surprised to see the return  of the 1980s phenomenon  of rough sleepers by various bridges and embankments and to see too that The Punch and Judy pub in Covent garden remains largely unchanged.
One good thing we were able to enjoy (along with an acceptable meal at Carluccio's) was a free Science Museum and the Saatchi gallery where you are pleasingly not met by calls for contributions.

The Saatchi is a great Gallery where work is refreshed regularly and the displays are uncluttered and challenging - currently there's a display around the theme of Paper and we were also able to marvel at a work I'd not engaged with before Richard Wilson's Site Specific Oil Installation (I don't believe it).

Idea 149 has been nicked.. oh no here it is it's Property

Although Marx is quoted as saying that  it is theft it very much falls into one of the big idfeas in the Lexicon of Economics.
While communists doubt the integrity of the concept those on the right see it as essential for freedom and individualism without which we'd all be part of the collective.
Locke is a big believer in Property but the case for the (present) ruling classes having appropriated  as robber barons what belongs to all is a difficult one to dispute - at least I have the rights to an allotment.