The State We're In: (Revised Edition)

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In the time it takes to fly from London to Chicago, each finds something in the other that they didn’t even realise they needed.

Tate Britain has rehung its art collection: What can we learn?

For conservatives, my crime was that I had written a too plausible but none the less wrong critique of what Mrs Thatcher had done to Britain. Engel gives the example of it becoming a legal requirement in 1973 to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. No doubt the reaction of the markets to Kwasi Kwarteng’s swiftly aborted “fiscal event” was skittish to the point of hysterical. The invention of tubes of paint, as well as faster drying paint and collapsible easels, allowed artists to explore faster, more spontaneous ways of painting, often outdoors 'en plein air'.Due to lack of funds we couldn’t afford to get a cast so we constructed one out of a wooden wine box, gaffa tape and an old crepe bandage. But whatever the reason the market finally lost its temper with Britain, the key thing is that it could not be resisted. If I had made the case for stakeholding much more around Britain and America's experience - and downplayed its success in German and Japanese companies, where so much is muddied by other economic problems - the argument would have been culturally easier to accept. After what seemed like years looking for a record deal (probably because I’d been through all this before with my first band Kitsch, demo after demo, gig after gig, until finally the bass player Paul Raven – who went on to play in Killing Joke – and myself were given the boot for being ‘too rock n roll’ and not the direction the band wanted to go.

The State We’re In’ Story by Tyla J. Pallas The Dogs D’Amour – ‘The State We’re In’ Story by Tyla J. Pallas

One time these girls who had agreed to put me up suggested I sleep not on but behind the sofa as the last bloke who stayed there got bottled with a milk bottle when the jealous boyfriend popped over unannounced. We all piled into the Mercedes estate and set off for the opposite side of Denmark where we would get another ferry to Sweden. We are always prone to moan and complain and imagine that ‘the good old days’ were a real thing (they weren’t) but there is a collective weariness across the British Isles; a sense that nothing is working quite like it should. Due to misplacing his passport, he told us he’d been living on the ferry for a number of months and that he was recently divorced from his Spanish princess bride.Artists of different generations have been working at a time of upheaval, whether Brexit, Covid, a cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine or the social movements of Black Lives Matter and Me Too. I was living in London at the time and, though I’ve lived all over the world in the intervening years, here I am again, back in London.