"I Can Hardly Explain It" [NOBL]

I think there are quite a few of us who are scratching our heads at the latest developments with Undershaw, the one-time home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

You can read my original post on the matter from last July, as well as a post that contained a letter from a number of scholars imploring that English Heritage grant Undershaw Grade I status to protect it as an historical landmark.

Evidently Tessa Jowell, the Culture Minister thinks that the house is not worthy because Conan Doyle - how did she put it - does not occupy a "position in the nation's consciousness." No, certainly not with Sherlock Holmes being named as one of the U.K.'s cultural icons. Nor with Conan Doyle being the J.K. Rowling of his day. Nor with a Tube station decked out in Sherlock Holmes illustrations.

Even Alfred Lord Tennyson's grandmother's house got a Grade II listing, so the bar can't be that high...