Back in June when I walked into Grosvenor Square I saw this Statue of Ronald Reagan on a plinth outside the former US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London with the statue bound in plastic sacking and red cord.

For those not familiar with Reagan, he was President of the United States Of America from 1981 to 1989. He had an interesting history in that apart from being a film actor he was an activist for and president of the Screen Actors Guild before moving into mainstream politics.

Two Presidents

Now the statue is unveiled and so is the one of Dwight D. Eisenhower at the other side of the Square. Eisenhower was president of the United States from 1953 to 1961 and his reputation has only grown over the years.

His rank as the overall commander of the Allied Forces in the D-Day landings an onward to bring WWII to an end is part of that. But also his stance on the danger of the military-industrial complex subverting democracy in the USA. I wonder what he would think of today’s world?

The shiny material of which the statues are cast reminds me of the liquid metal of which the T-1000 Terminator, in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was made.

Note the eagle on top of the building that is now the Grosevnor Hotel. I wonder why the eagle remains, given that The US Embassy moved from Grosvenor Square to Nine Elms on the South Bank of the Thames in 2018?

Maybe it is a symbolic anchor for the statues that now stand in front of a hotel rather than an embassy. I wonder whether they are annoyed at being left behind to adorn a hotel?

Today I chanced upon an animal rights protest meeting at Marble Arch.

The man in this photo was dressed to represent bycatch.

Bycatch

Bycatch is where fishing vessels trap species in fishing gear that they don’t intend to catch. They carelessly catch marine mammals, seabirds, turtles, and sharks and more. And in catching them in the machinery and nets they injure or kill the bycatch even if they the throw the catch back into the sea.

And then there’s trawlers scraping the sea bed with nets as wide as the wingspan of thirteen jumbo jets. The weighted net of heavy ropes scrapes all the life out of the seabed.

Badger Culls

A couple were holding a sign protesting badger culls, and we talked about the court case currently being brought by Wild Justice to try to end the culls.

The science doesn’t support culling badgers as a way to stop the spread of bovine TB. It is not even clear that the vector of transmission is from badgers to cows. It could well be the other way around.

The Badger Trust estimates that since 2013, almost 248,000 badgers have been shot.

It’s heartbreaking. In the past I have said the cull is payback for the mass protests that brought an end to fox hunting.

The couple I was speaking to said that politicians were beholden to the farming lobby but that now even farmers themselves were unsure that badger culling worked.

I’m not sure what the benefit of the protest was. Maybe it gave encouragement to the various organisations that were presented. The speaker was telling the assembled protesters to keep on. The speech was ‘them and us’. The mood was ‘them and us’.

Look at these faces. How is it going to be resolved without demonising others? How am I going to do that?

At the animal rights protest, this man stood out because he was tall, and for his features and his glasses.

And I really wanted to see how well the lens would perform.

I shot with the Fuji X-T50 with 55-200mm lens. The EXIF data says I shot at 200mm, at f5.6 and ISO 125, and with a shutter speed of 1/280 second.

That’s 200mm on an APS-C sensor, which is equivalent to 300mm full-frame.

And the lens seems fine.