Images

1907

Lenin, in London for a Congress,
every morning dressed quickly
in his Kensington Square lodgings
pulled on his flat cap and hurried out
with one thought
in his icecold brain, one sight
in his piercing Tartar eyes:
the stall outside
King’s Cross Station selling
his favourite fish-and-chips.



1949

On the Kolyma River,
reported the Soviet journal Nature,
a ‘working party’
discovered a frozen stream
in the permafrost, containing
a perfectly preserved prehistoric
salamander. They hacked out the
30,000 year old fish from the ice
and devoured it straightaway
‘with relish’.