The Politics of Dancing

Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,   many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns. The Lions, of course,   left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. ...

VAN GOGH IN BRITAIN AT THE TATE MODERN*  So many people visited the Van Gogh exhibition that restitution had to be sought from the Arts Council for damage to the gallery flooring. That was in 1947, the last time London hosted a major Van Gogh exhibition.   The famous Dutch painter was, to put it mildly, a crowd puller. And indeed no sooner had the current exhibition at Tate Britain opened than it sold out. Crowds queue to view the pictures then crowd into the galleries, seeking to get a reasonable view of the paintings amidst the milling mass of eager consumers. Until, as a woman stated standing close by to her friend, “these then are the famous sunflowers.   And indeed, they were, in all their glory, so that you could almost smell the pungent aroma coming from their dark hearts. The Van Gogh ‘brand’ encapsulated? There is also, of course, the madness, the odd business with the ear, the melancholy of the self-portraits and more recently the accompanying song... ...