Just Stop Oil protestors threw a tin of tomato soup over Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers'. Luckily the work was covered with glass, so the soup dribbled downwards, resembling a kinetic installation that could immediately have been transferred to Tate Modern.
There follows a mischievous thought. Maybe the protesters were complaining that Van Gogh had not painted more in watercolours. But that is terrible. I can't say that. It demeans and patronises a group who wanted to point out that art is an extension of corporate power. And corporate power is responsible for climate change. And fighting class oppression and climate change is the same. And direct action is inevitable. So we have all got that, haven't we?
Climate activists say that law-abiding protest is pointless as Governments don't listen, and therefore the only option is disruption. Does that get an outcome favourable to the protesters other than publicity? Hmmm.
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How do you deal with the Just Stop Oil folk? The writer Douglas Murray gave an account of witnessing a scene in July when climate protesters glued themselves to works in the Uffizi, Florence. He says that security staff unglued and removed the individuals very quickly, contrasting this with the allegation that police in London seem more concerned about protecting the protesters.
Why, in Daily Mail speak, are the police pussyfooting around? Sadly we need some law. In the 2021 'Ziegler' case the defendants, protesting against the arms trade, were charged with wilful obstruction of a highway without lawful authority or excuse, contrary to S137(1) of the Highways Act 1980. Their argued reasonable excuse was that they were exercising their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights ('the ECHR'). The Supreme Court agreed with the protesters.
The ECHR is incorporated into UK law through the Human Rights Act 1998. This may cause Sir Tufton Bufton to retch over his devilled kidneys. Going further, Sir Tufton may rage that this is all down to the EU. It is of course not - the ECHR is an entirely independent animal. Nevertheless rage ahead Sir T ('We should damn well repeal the Act!'). But careful where you go there, and also the Government does not currently have much slack for new things on the policy slate....
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However, there could be flights of imagination on what to do with Just Stop Oil. Take the folk up on the Dartford Crossing Bridge. Why not suspend a net underneath the gantry where they were holed up, to protect them from falling and dying and killing others in the process.......and leave them there? They would benefit from their banner being up there longer, so there is nothing not to like.
That may not be so mad. I have read about when nine activists glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen factory. The VW management apparently turned the lights off and left the protesters overnight (as the Desk Sergeant might have said, 'to cool off lads'). The protesters complained about having been humiliated, left in the cold and dark and 'without facilities'. The disruptors had been disrupted. And there could be the robust response, 'Well, we never asked you to do this in the first place'. Curiouser and curiouser.
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They fog up. They smear. Sometimes they slip to the point of awkwardness and nullification of their purpose. But this is irrelevant if you are buying a pair of clear-lensed aviators (as sported apparently by, amongst others, Helena Christensen, Jared Leto and Jennifer Aniston). Wearing for style, not for sight. And when the fashion goes, out go the glasses. For the rest of we miserable myopics, do that and it would be down the nearest pothole.
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A suggestion for how the England World Cup team should respond to issues of human rights and discrimination in Qatar. Simple. Play badly during the Group stage and be hoofed out for an early return to UK. Perfectly achievable.
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Have you seen the Doctor? There was a pre-pandemic time when the middle-class North London challenge was to get to a play off-West End, see it reviewed as a triumph, and then watch it transferred to the West End where the rest of the world could see it at twice or more the ticket price.
'The Doctor', written by Robert Icke, was one of those, though the pandemic delayed the transfer to this year. and so muggins shelled out, and we took our place at the Duke of York in St Martin's Lane.
Juliet (Dr Ruth Wolff) Stevenson in the key role is pretty good, and the play, about medical ethics and lots of more, was given broadly an enthusiastic reception by the critics. At the ecstatic end, Arifa Akbar in the Guardian applauded its 'tension, combative intellectual complexity, and bare-toothed drama.'
I was not entirely convinced. The first reservation was over the breadth of topics it tried to cover, numbering at minimum racism, misogyny, trans and anti-semitism, mixed into a bowl of stage spaghetti. The second was non-binary casting - this went way beyond the norms we have now (rightfully) accepted. I will not list the non-binaries, but the apotheosis was a black, Roman Catholic priest (pivotal role after Stevenson's) played by a sandy-haired white man. To me this extent of disruption demonstrated no truths, but merely created a smokescreen that robbed the audience of a clear sight of the weighty issues covered by the play.
An alternative, and cynical, perspective, is that the playwright intended a conceit that would flatter the audience into a false hubristic belief in its intellectual reasoning capability. Alternatively again, I am thick and did not get it in the way that superior beings did.
Next up will be 'Good', starring David Tennant, and centring on a decent man's descent into Nazism. It is on at the bijou Harold Pinter Theatre. I don't know if the small capacity of the theatre contributes to the cost of tickets, but even by West End standards the cost has been severely ramped up. 'Well my son, if you want David Tennant, this is what you have to pay'. Answer: 'Ok, but at these prices I'd expect at least a Dalek'.
So it had better be good (boom boom), but somehow I think it will be.
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The long-running industrial action of barristers doing criminal work was settled while Dominic Raab was not Secretary of State for Justice. Only noting.
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A phone call to my dentists, to make a check-up appointment. To my request, the receptionist - a young voice - enthusiastically said: 'Amazing'. We looked at dates. She offered a date. I said I could do that date. She said 'Amazing'. I rejoined that it was amazing. We parted cheerily. One of us had been using irony - you will have to work out which one.
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Do you follow Strictly, I'm a Celebrity, and similar? Do you dash on to social media to 'slam' judges, celebrities and anyone else you fancy attacking? Do you feel that Twitter, Facebook et al should employ idiocy moderators?
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A work trip to Birmingham. When I last did the trip, journey time was c. 1 hour 20 minutes. On this basis, what is HS2 about, at least for this journey? Ah. All has changed. Now, 1 hour 44 minutes was the best I could do, for a departure between 7am and 8am. More stops, and if I had fancied getting to Blackpool before Tess and Claud, I could have stayed on board after Brum. Train operators are having a tough time. Apparently there is a shortage of drivers. In the meantime, if you have to travel long-distance by UK train, bring a good book.
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But a reassuring reminder of how travelling life used to be, is couple of folk, work colleagues, spending the whole journey moaning about their bosses.
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'Good' was good, but not outstanding. The best parts were the interactions between David Tennant's naive (if you want to take that line) John Halder and his Jewish friend Maurice (Elliot Levey), until eventually Halder could not resist the temptation to put on the jackboots. The third principal player was poor Sharon Small, poor as she was required to morph between different characters in an increasingly bewildering range of Scottish accents plus one ripped off from Southern USA (or it could have come from the Borders).
At least there was no gender fluidity. Ha ha - you must be joking. Amongst her diverse tasks Shaz was required to play a male SS Officer. It is easy to do that for a woman - you simply drop your voice an octave and, trouser-clad, manspread your legs. Everyone gets it immediately. And, as icing on the cake, Elliot Levey had a moment of playing the Officer's wife, doing a credible impersonation of Dick Emery.
The play has been described as the definitive piece written about the Holocaust in the English-speaking theatre. I have done some decent academic study on the Holocaust. I don't get that conclusion.
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There's a football tournament going on. If you have a basic understanding of the metaphors you will know that Wales did not turn up for their game against Iran. If you are more advanced you will get the minor witticism that the purpose of Harry Maguire's head injury assessment was to see if he indeed has a brain.
But otherwise there is the fractionally more important issue of whether Qatar should have been allowed to host the World Cup. The scimitars have been out for this tiny peninsular kingdom, with its native population of c. 300,000 plus ex pats plus a lot of South Asian immigrants there to do the jobs the Qataris don't want to do...like building football stadia.
The natives have expected the event to showcase the best of Qatar and give a big boost to its tourist economy; the outcome so far has not been as planned.
The charge sheet prepared by the Western media has three principal heads: Qatar (1) exploits migrant labour (2) discriminates big time against the LGBTplus community and (3) got the World Cup through world-beating corruption.
Who knows on (3)? The demise of Blacklisted Blatter has not helped FIFA's reputation, and the current Chairman incumbent's muddling rant on sport and politics makes Boris Johnson's Peppa Pig speech look like rapier-sharp communication. Infantilissimo, one might say.
There has been a big wallop against Qatar's human rights record, but the country might have a point in shouting hypocrisy. Egypt would have been ok as the host nation, would it not - that lovely Salah chap plays for Liverpool? Ok, but make sure you ignore their own human rights record. The English cricketers are dragging their exhausted bodies off to Pakistan...where gay sex is illegal. When it hosted the Beijing Olympics in 2008, China didn't get a pasting over its treatment of inconvenient minorities. And don't even start talking about Iranian men (you remember that song from the last World Cup?).
To me, it's pretty clear why we are where we are. And here it is: resentment. We resent how a bunch of tribal tea towel heads could have woken up one morning and realised in Beverley Hillbillyesque style that they were sitting on inestimable riches from natural resources... which the so and so's then had the temerity to exploit. We resent how the Qataris have tortured a knob of desert into an air-conditioned state of civilisation (from which the most prosperous escape at hottest times to plunder Harrods, Selfridges, and the welcoming stores of New and Old Bond Street). We resent the robed ones when the UK popular press trumpets in astonishment that Qatar (via its Sovereign Wealth Fund) owns some of the classiest pieces of real estate in London (far-sighted redeployment of capital for when the oil and gas eventually run out).
Thus comes the feeling that giving the World Cup to Qatar is just not football. And what is more they have disturbed the Premier League season. Disgraceful!
PS More footie in December. Sorry.
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Ok, you have to be ancient to get this without research, but Matt Hancock's reunion with Gina Coladangelo reminded me of Leslie Phillips' character in 'The Navy Lark': 'Left hand down a bit'.
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A final, and positive, entertainment note. I was blessed with the opportunity to join a seven year-old and a five-year old in seeing Matilda, the film. Oh joy!
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The author is a writer, speaker, historian, occasional tour guide, and former Managing Partner of a City law firm.