Our London Correspondent reports that the latest and most fashionable souvenir to go on sale there is a reproduction cast-iron “paperweight/doorstop/bookend based on the mooring bollards of Regents Canal”. Available in black or fluorescent red, these items were designed by a designer who was being worked with by another chap who was commissioned by a Creative Agency. The result is a “desirable antidote to the overly-commercial, tacky souvenirs” available elsewhere, it says here.
A bollard at Meelick
Well, that’s nice. Maybe Waterways Ireland could commission the same creative types to design a range of reproductions of Irish waterways bollards; folk could be encouraged to collect the entire set.
But one minor drawback does strike me. The artistic merits of these reproduction bollards are of course obvious, but as souvenirs they have one minor drawback. A souvenir is something you buy, while on holiday, to take home to someone else. Nowadays, the steamer services are not what they once were and many folk travel on these new-fangled flying-machines. But according to that nice Mr O’Leary, who operates some such machines, you may take only 10 kg of cabin baggage. These bollards, though, weigh about 1.5 kg each, which rather limits the number of bollards you can carry as souvenirs.
Irish waterways history 