How shocking! Big Ben has gone silent until 2021! That's a recording of our last hearing of it:
The Great Bell has sounded on the hour for 157 years, tells us the BBC, adding that it went silent before and that it'll still sound for important events, such as New Year's Eve. How terrifying, this feeling that in these times of impending troubles, the mouth of UK will be muffled (never mind that in this occasion, this is by the hands of indispensable repair-works).
The inevitable global catastrophe that will befall on a World in capitalist free fall is indeed slow to arrive, once you resigned yourself to its inescapability, but in four years, so many things can happen. It seems the transition will be made in a World that retained very little of the symbols of its glorious time, with landmarks either behind a wall [1] or silenced. Imagine this deafening silence through such little things as the BBC Radio playing the chimes in real-time. It will now turn to some recordings! Substituting them by the sound of Nottingham's bells has been considered but eventually turned down. Too bad... on our way back from visiting Cumbria, we got the feeling that UK has always the resource to replace the original by something that gets close enough. But no, we'll be sticking to memories of how it was before, of fading memories, of copies or reproductions. I'll be holding my breath until 2021.