ANYONE unlucky enough to find themselves at the new University College Hospital in coming years may be forgiven if they fail to notice the giant pebble as they stagger through the front door.
The unassuming lump of granite was shipped from Brazil and polished at a cost of £70,000, thanks to a long-standing agreement between the hospital and the Slade School of Art.
The King’s Fund – backed by alternative therapy advocate Prince Charles – paid for it to brighten up the place a bit.
Dubbed The Monolith, it is, according to the hospital, a “prehistoric pebble beach that fused under intense heat and pressure millions of years ago” and will “represent the history and development of the Hospital Trust and its diverse parts fused into a cohesive whole”.
Trust bosses hope it will create “a welcome feeling, a sense of reassurance and even humour.”
You’re having a laugh, seems to be the general response.
Still, you have to admire artist John Aiken for coming up with that name. No-one’s going to pay £70,000 for a pebble. But The Monolith?
A steady dose of nitrous oxide and you could almost believe you were in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.
How much would performance artists have to pay Trust chief executive Robert Naylor (salary: £160,000) and chairman Peter Dixon (salary: also lots) to don monkey suits and dance round it, do you think?
Pictured right: How we think Trust chief executive Robert Naylor will celebrate the installation of ‘The Monolith’

The teacher-prince can give us all good advice

HE has the sort of gentle voice and gentle manners you would expect of a Burmese prince. But what worries him is that children in Britain aren’t getting the best tuition.
So, the exiled Prince Shwebomim, who works as a teacher in Golders Green, has devised a scheme to enable ‘disadvantaged’ children to be taught English, maths and economics at a cost of £10 an hour.
Prince Shwebomim, aged 56, has spent 43 years in exile from his country where he was head of a 250-year-old royal dynasty.
His life in danger, he saw his parents and four brothers for the last time before boarding a flight to England in 1961.
Many Burmese nationals, apparently, do not believe that the Prince exists – he has become something of a myth – but many anticipate his return to the Burmese throne.
But they will have to wait because the Prince – who obtained three masters degrees at Birmingham, Kent and Imperial universities – is overwhelmed with disappointment with the youth of today.
Now the Prince has set up an Independent Tutorial College off North End Road to help teenagers pass their exams by offering them private education on the cheap.
“Standards are slipping,” he said. “Teenagers are in need of some proper training in the core subjects. But for many this is not possible. Some private colleges are offering £40-55 per hour for an hour’s tuition.
“We will be offering around £10 an hour as a supplementary to their full time education. Initially we will make a loss, but we have accounted for that. If someone comes who is really poor, we may even take some of them on for free – I don’t mind.”

Post trauma for Clarke

HE was once nicknamed the Willoughby Whippet because of his speed at delivering the mail around his Hampstead patch.
Bestowed a life peerage by Labour in 1998, Lord Clarke of Hampstead (pictured) – who joined the post office as a telegraph boy at the age of 14 – was twice the unsuccessful candidate for Hampstead and Highgate for Labour – in February and October 1974.
Before he ran for the seat, he had already become a well known councillor on the Labour benches at the Town Hall.
But the long-term party member will now be speaking against the government at a meeting on Wednesday organised by union leaders to fight plans to privatise the post office.
“I find it an obscenity that a government I worked so hard for all my life should contemplate it,” he told me. “My record as a Labour MP stands second to none. I have not just been a quiet person. I fought hard to get Kinnock and Smith and Blair in government.
“There is absolutely no case for the Post Office to be taken out of the public sector whatsoever. It’s vital that we speak up now and not wait until it’s a fait accompli.”
But the 72-year-old peer does not hold Blair himself responsible. “It’s not on his agenda,” he told me. “I think it’s the people around him.”
The rally takes place next Wednesday at 2pm at Friends House in Euston Road.

Coming clean on arms

IRONICALLY, as President Bush makes fearsome noises about attacking Iran, the man who launched a publicity drive to make the public aware of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, lies seriously ill in a Camden hospital.
Aware of the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the extraordinary 96-year-old Professor Joseph Rotblat launched a website more than a year ago (www.comeclean.org.uk) to keep the world informed.
Get-well messages from fellow peaceniks continue to be sent to Professor Rotblat – known simply to them as a ‘Prof’ – where they are posted above his bed in h is little room off a public ward.
Among those who have sent letters are the former US defence secretary Robert McNamara, John Heldren, an energy expert in the Clinton administration and the scientist Richard Garwin.
Rotblat, who lives in West Hampstead, worked as a physicist on the atom-bomb in the US in the mid-1940s until he disagreed with its use and left the project, eventually founding an international body against the proliferation of nuclear weapons known as Pugwash. Later, he received a Nobel peace prize.
“He isn’t well,” Rotblat’s secretary Sally Milne told me yesterday (Wednsday), “but with such an extraordinary man you can never tell what will happen.”

A drink before bedtime