an uncropped one in the eye

Someone emailed me about that picture I used for the Carillion post a couple of days ago. Yes, I did crop the left hand side. Not so much to make it fit, but rather more in the interests of general taste. It's a picture of fat cat city businessmen after their lunch, too drunk to even move onto the puddings. The women have all left the area.

Events of the last few days have added further piquancy to the scene. My narrative was about outsourcing, and we now have a French example to add to the mix. The Bayeux tapestry is being loaned to the British by France. A blinder of a play by Macron. It's a French state item, which he cut through red tape to have delivered quickly. And whilst French, it was originally outsourced to Kent for construction by Europe's finest embroiderers.

Maybe it does show the demise of Harold Godwinson at the arrows of William the Conqueror. Perhaps that folk observation overcooks Anglo-Saxons as the namers of animals: (bull, pig, sheep) and the Normans as the namers of the food: (beef, pork, mutton). But Bayeux Scene 52 shows the Anglo-Saxon infantry under serious threat from the Norman cavalry.

Macron knows not to forget that thousands were killed and many more deprived of their livelihoods at and after the Battle of Hastings. After 1066, as the Smithsonian review of the Bayeux describes, the next four years witnessed a truly exceptional takeover of England’s resources by an elite from Normandy and other regions of northern France.

Or am I reading too much symbolism into all of this?

Let's go back to that colourful and this time tastefully miniaturised version of the English dining scene.

The full caption for L'après-dinée des Anglais reads:

"Six men in varying stages of intoxication surround a low, cloth-covered dinner-table (not bare as was customary for dessert), on which are a big punch-bowl, bottle, and glasses. One lies on the floor clasping a bottle and shouting, his chair overturned. Two pairs converse affectionately; an elderly man, his elbows on the table, supports his head, registering anguish. A seventh stands at a sideboard with a chamber-pot taken from a cupboard in the sideboard. (This was the practice after the ladies had left the dining-room) ... On the wall is a landscape with heavy rain as the chief feature.

The original of the print was published by Aaron Martinet and is available via the British Museum, as well as being seen on more traditional pub walls throughout the land.