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A couple of local by-elections are happening in May and roads in the wards affected (not ours) are sprouting bright orange signs (the same signs as in the general election) that say Lib-Dems Winning Here. My dreaming self reacted by designing an AI poster in support of our MP, Josh Babarinde, featuring him as an adorable, furry raccoon delivering a speech in the parliament of the animals and another, highlighting his opposition to sexual exploitation, which was alarmingly obscene.
Rumour reverberates, bouncing off walls, that there's a video doing the rounds that our current PM would like to see suppressed. There's a still image in the media which shows two unidentifiable human beings in an embrace which If it's not a fake it might as well be, because it reveals nothing. Kissing you best bro is not illegal but taking a lot of money from him and not declaring it could be fatal to a Prime Minister. No-one would be greatly sorry if Keir Starmer had to resign- yet another in the line of terrible Prime Ministers that we've sweated under since the beginning of the century.
Meanwhile, over in revolutionary France, no-one can get a grip on the tiller. Jacobins are killing Girondins and vice versa, our best general has defected to the Austrians, the provinces are sending out counter-revolutionary armies and Jean-Paul Marat- that courageous and fearsomely consistent man- has just been stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Carlyle has an identifying epithet for all his chief players and the one he has pinned on Marat's lapel is "squalid". Now I admire Marat to the point of loving him and if he went on a bit about murdering his enemies he was merely being more forthright than politicians commonly are. All politicians above a certain level practice or condone murder and Marat- bless his memory- was no hypocrite.
When I was talking about Jacques-Louis David a while back I skirted around his Marat picture but I can restrain myself no longer. Here it is- in all its simplicity and concentrated emotion- a pieta for the modern age......
Incidentally, reading about the ungovernable state revolutionary France got itself into has greatly increased my respect and admiration for Napoleon....
Rumour reverberates, bouncing off walls, that there's a video doing the rounds that our current PM would like to see suppressed. There's a still image in the media which shows two unidentifiable human beings in an embrace which If it's not a fake it might as well be, because it reveals nothing. Kissing you best bro is not illegal but taking a lot of money from him and not declaring it could be fatal to a Prime Minister. No-one would be greatly sorry if Keir Starmer had to resign- yet another in the line of terrible Prime Ministers that we've sweated under since the beginning of the century.
Meanwhile, over in revolutionary France, no-one can get a grip on the tiller. Jacobins are killing Girondins and vice versa, our best general has defected to the Austrians, the provinces are sending out counter-revolutionary armies and Jean-Paul Marat- that courageous and fearsomely consistent man- has just been stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Carlyle has an identifying epithet for all his chief players and the one he has pinned on Marat's lapel is "squalid". Now I admire Marat to the point of loving him and if he went on a bit about murdering his enemies he was merely being more forthright than politicians commonly are. All politicians above a certain level practice or condone murder and Marat- bless his memory- was no hypocrite.
When I was talking about Jacques-Louis David a while back I skirted around his Marat picture but I can restrain myself no longer. Here it is- in all its simplicity and concentrated emotion- a pieta for the modern age......
Incidentally, reading about the ungovernable state revolutionary France got itself into has greatly increased my respect and admiration for Napoleon....
