Egocentrism before the Selfie Age

"One of the mirrors in the house, an old pier glass inside a gilded oval frame that had lost its lustre a generation ago, had cracked from too much self-reflection. The more often they looked, the less clearly they saw themselves."
Noelle Mackay, All the Rest (2017)

Why won't the patient take his medicine?

Will this country die from obstinacy?

 Increased support among European nations including UK for EU following Brexit

I'm standing on the wall, berating destiny. Call me Cassandra, if you like. You may think I'm mad and ignore me, but you need me as a particle of collective consciousness in the grand muddle of truth.

Cassandra, Cassandra, You're fated to madness, it's out of your hands Destined to say what no one wants to know

'Cassandra', Famiglia album, written by Sophie Michelle Ellis-Bextor, Ed Harcourt, sung by Sophie Ellis Bextor

READ FULL TIRADE AT THE LAST POST

Catatonic

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent.....Plato

 Cat Portrait by Martin Hübscher Photography

With Britain confirmed as the new Atlantis, contriving its own liquidation through the hubris of Brexit and Conservative Government, where can a girl go in pursuit of freedom and happiness? Our European neighbours who we have so rudely shunned are already showing us what we will be missing in their civilized world....

The Denialists

Woman Lamenting by a Burning City

1550-55
Pen in black, brush in brown Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

by Jan Swart van Groningen. Image: WGA

The woman might be Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no-one believed or one of Lot's daughters, or just any mad woman weeping for her ruined country while it's harried by politicians eating babies and kissing chips [sic] - nobody knows.

Gilded Dramas

Gilded Interiors: French Masterpieces of Gilt Bronze
exhibition at The Wallace Collection

When children don't want to live any more

William Blake Infant Sorrow Illustration to Songs of Experience. Image: Wikipedia

'...it was in his nature to do it…it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live' Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895

Give back her future

The New Cosette, marching to Unite for Europe on 25 March, 2017 © Martin Hübscher

If you were young today, how would you be feeling about your future that was decided by your elders in a badly informed opinion poll last year?

 

 

Augustus Leopold Egg Past and Present 2 © Tate

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Damaged world

Gainsborough's The Morning Walk

slashed on 18 March, 2017

Monogamy wars

The darker the times, the lighter the entertainments.

LADY WHILTON'S WEDDING
by Barbara Metzger, read by Pippa Rathborne
available on Amazon, Audible and iTunes

Portrait of Lieutenant General the Hon. Sir Charles Stewart, K.B., in hussar uniform by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
The 1814 'Londonderry' version of Lawrence's portrait of the future 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, wearing the medal he was awarded for service as a commander in the Peninsular War.
Lawrence was the visual propagandist of Regency romance and glamour. He gave all his sitters the gloss of celebrity makeovers, and made every portrait look like a love affair in paint. Image: Wikipedia

The air in my country

“The air in my country is very foul”
Ian McEwan, at a press conference in Barcelona, March, 2017

 Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels 1562
Oil on oak, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Image: WGA

"Now is not the time to obstruct the will of the people" Theresa May in the House of Commons, 2017.

"Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs." Robespierre, in a speech to the National Convention, 1794.

Maximilien Robespierre, oil on canvas by Pierre-Roch Vigneron, 1786; in the Museum of French History, Palace of Versailles. Image: Britannica.com The embodiment of the people 's will, and the exponent of State terrorism: Maximilien Robespierre, smiling his sweet megalomaniac's smile, before the Revolution.

We are being bullied into acquiescence with a disastrous rupture with Europe. Our economy and civilization are being degraded, people we love might be torn from us, and we are told to be silent.

Brexit is being imposed upon us in a reign of Terror, in which dissent is suppressed and the rule of law threatened.

"Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil." Robespierre.

"Enemies of the people"
Daily Mail denouncing the judges of the High Court who upheld Gina Miller's case for parliamentary sovereignty.

Our centuries' old representative parliamentary democracy is broken, smashed under the weight of public opinion polls and political opportunism.

This is not democracy; this is authoritarianism.

If you don't like Brexit, and you love your country, don't shut up.  Never stop protesting.

“It is the right of those of us who voted to remain to continue to speak for what we believe is in our country’s best interest and not allow ourselves to be cowed into silence.”
Ian McEwan, March, 2017

Detail from The Rape of Europa, bronze by Il Riccio (Andreo Briasco), 1520.
Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. Image: WGA

  Great Britain self-destructs:

IF ONLY IT WAS A BAD DREAM
DON'T LEAVE, TIFFANY
DOING THE MACARENA TO CATASTROPHE
ALFRED'S DOOMS
48-52

 

Enchanted Winter

Winter by Boucher, 1735. Image: WGA

New audiobook published specially to cheer up the end of this year and celebrate the new:
AN ENCHANTED CHRISTMAS
an anthology of romantic Christmas themed stories
by Barbara Metzger, read by Pippa Rathborne

Available on Audible, Amazon and iTunes

 Ghosts, magic and mistletoe wreathe these stories about the redemptive powers of love and laughter.

This new selection of Barbara Metzger's shorter romantic comedies is read by Pippa Rathborne in a special Christmas audiobook, available now and in the New Year, to cast enchantment over the Brexit -Trump winter.

AN ENCHANTED CHRISTMAS

Living under Democracy in USA and UK, 2016

Two Monkeys by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1562

Oil on oak panel, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image: WGA

The Compelling Entertainment of Catastrophe

Sofa by the Spanish cartoon artist Ekhi-Guinea

GRABS POPCORN is how humanity self-medicated its way to disaster instead of getting off the sofa to resist and protest.

 THE LAST POST?

Where today can you find

A PERFECT GENTLEMAN?

in a new audio version read by Pippa Rathborne,

available worldwide on Amazon, Audible and iTunes

Don't Leave, Tiffany

 

The Awakening Conscience by Holman Hunt, 1853

"Tiffany told everyone she was too good to be there and stormed out without realizing she had no money for a taxi, her phone was dead, and she was 3 miles from the nearest subway # Brexit"

Alfred's dooms

THE GUARDIAN OF DEMOCRACY

If only it was a bad dream

Gustave Doré, illustration to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 1868. Vivien leaves Merlin sleeping in the oak tree in which she has ensnared him "and the forest echoed 'fool'".

DOING THE MACARENA - TO CATASTROPHE

THE FATE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM AFTER BREXIT VOTE

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

Jon Stewart

The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H.White, The Once and Future King

48 - 52

Reactions to Brexit

The Female Traveller

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) in Turkish dress by Liotard c. 1756, the Baths Palace, Warsaw

Pippa Rathborne reads THE WRONG SHADE OF YELLOW by Margaret Eleanor Leigh
for sale on Audible, iTunes and Amazon