Monumental scandal, this Sherlock Holmes move

Published on Monday 14 April 2008 10:37

I CAN well sympathise with Sherlock Holmes aficionados worried stiff about the fate of the statue of their hero, soon to be removed from Picardy Place in the scourge of the trams upheaval.

The city council's monuments specialist Dorothy Marsh, to whom I doff my deerstalker, tells me the master sleuth, seen sporting a Hibs scarf from time to time, could be in storage for two years.

Couldn't he be relocated to the City Chambers quad, where too many residents don't seem to have a clue?

Says Welshpool-based Roy Upton-Holder, founder of The Deerstalker Society: "There are Sherlock Holmes societies in almost every country in the world except Scotland. A lot of us feel that the City of Edinburgh Council will have succeeded where Moriarty and Conan Doyle have failed – in getting rid of Sherlock Holmes."

Pleads another caped crusader for Holmes: "Might the nearest trams-stop to the statue be named after him?"

The seven feet-tall edifice stands yards from where his creator, Conan Doyle, lived. Cost, 45,000 in June 1991.

Prince charmless

If you think Dame Elizabeth Blackadder's portrait of Eric Milligan is a barely identifiable likeness and – believe me it is – have a dekko at the new official painting of Prince Charles. How could somebody get anybody so far off reality?

Charles is boot-faced and his bemedalled torso is closer to Idi Amin than the slimline prince we all know and love.

Remarkable the similarity between the two portraits from an artistic point of view. In monetary terms it's said that Charles may have paid up to 20,000 for his.

Council taxpayers are thought to have paid 15,000 for Milligan's. Is it vanity? No, posterity.

Police thriller

I'm reading here in the papers that a Scots polisman (just an extraordinary copper, he once felled trees for a living) has scooped a record 800,000 advance publishing deal for his debut thriller.

Must get into this book lark myself, I'm thinking. But I'd need to get out and about a lot more first. Folks tell me there's a big, wide, wonderful world out there.