Oh, I forgot that people get emails of transcripts who follow the thread!
That was about a conversation I had yesterday with a shareholder who is also a regular, but who never expresses his opinions in public. I took it down because I thought he should express them, but I don't think he will.
The gist of it was that the 'pillar' is a good example of the conflict between drastic change and the principles of conservation. I have spent a lot of my working life restoring and conserving expensive bits of stone and marble sculpture and architectural antiques, and the golden rule is that you do not leave your mark on your work for all to see forever more, unless you deliberately want others to see the difference between the restoration and the original, like a lot of museums do.
So I am sensitised to any possibility of drastic things being done to the fabric of the pub, so that one or two people can say, "We did that. Good, isn't it?"
Having said that, I pestered Ian Wood for a year or two to let me make the hanging bell sign on the front to replace the traditional sign, and Caspar Taylor and I made it just before the buy-out. (No part of the original fabric was harmed in the making, apart from three drill-holes). Good, isn't it?
There are a couple of new signs to take posters for the front of the pub being made right now, and they are truly beautiful. I mentioned to the commissioning board-member how good R's signs were looking, and they said, "They're not R's signs, they're MY signs". That's when an alarm bell went off in my head.