Two good Samaritans in Bloomsbury

Brushing the statue's teeth ... that does look like what this guy is doing, doesn't it. At first glance, at least.

We're at Guilford Place, on the north end of Lambs Conduit Street. So this is the Bloomsbury district of central London.

And the wider picture offers a broader context. 

With the craftsman's permission, I filmed him at work for a couple of minutes. He's cleaning and repairing the sculpture on top of a water fountain that dates back to 1870.

​And he wasn't brushing the woman's teeth but restoring her nose ...

A website about the fountain and the conservation work being undertaken explains:

The statue is a sculptured marble figure of the ‘Woman of Samaria’, in loose robes and scarf, kneeling on left knee to either fill or pour a water jar. In the story of the woman of Samaria meeting Jesus he embraces her even though she is a social outcast with five previous husbands: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.”

Samaria is in what we would now call the West Bank, so part of Palestine. And of course people from Samaria are Samaritans.

So too, in my view, is the guy doing the work (in the biblical sense of the good Samaritan, someone coming to the aid of a stranger in need) - so here we have Bloomsbury's two good Samaritans.