Czech Art

I was following Moscow Rules as I turned left out of Bywater Street and headed along King’s Road for Sloane Street and Harrods. I finally managed to drop my sinister looking tail in the Food Hall and continued north across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens towards the hideous and forbidding Czech Embassy on Notting Hill Gate.

Connie and George had warned me that the StB were still very much alive and kicking, but I hoped to avoid capture and torture in some grisly Cold War cellar.

I was to beard the beast in its den.  Was it a trick I wondered? Could these people really be housing an exhibition of modern art – or would the displays all be wrapped up in messages of praise to the workers paradise?

And so after half an hour of imagining my morning, I set out for High Street Kensington and walked up Palace Gardens. To marvel at the palaces.

It all turned out as sinister and dark as I had earlier imagined.  The architecture has a grandiose beauty, for sure, but I’m not convinced that much beauty is housed within.

Some embassies, some residencies and many, many unmarked mansions presumably inhabited by “Ogliarchs” (my wife’s word), Tech Kings or the otherwise Uber rich.

I pictured fat, bearded men with glistening whiskers and oiled bodies awaiting the hookers, alcohol and recreational drugs ordered for them by muscled and dangerous minions with hooded eyes and scarred faces.

It was then that surreality took over and fiction became fact. I was ordered off the road by a security guard who became irate when I questioned his authority.

I stood my ground and asked how then he expected me to cross to my destination at the Czech embassy and why was he denying me use of a road I had walked since childhood, unimpeded.

Removable bollards guarded the entrance.  Apparently, the Uber important residents of this fabulous road demanded the right to be driven at high speed through the gates and my use of the crossing would impede their progress.

How then would a high speed vehicle chase cope with the removable bollards I asked. Oh, well they would be lowered by arrangement before the vehicles appeared. How then, I asked, was I impeding these super important people?  Had they received notice that a high speed chariot was about to appear? And if not, why should I not be granted passage?

My arguments failed to find favour and the situation was becoming nasty. The guy in question was not a policeman and was not employed by the Crown. Apparently he was from some private sector security company. So far, so murky. I moved on before I was cuffed and removed for extraordinary rendition.

The Czech Embassy was even more bizarre .  I should have been warned by the exhibition of Kafka related art on the railings outside.

I rang the doorbell and nobody answered and so I eventually telephoned and someone said they would come down and let me in.

Eventually a very tall, pencil thin and stern lady let me in.  The gallery was the size of a large bathroom and I was told she had to remain with me, for security purposes.

Was she StB I asked? She claimed not, but my suspicions remained.  Her cover was that of cultural attaché, but who knows her real role.

As is my wont, I engaged her in conversation and we ranged from communism to the art on display. Communism doesn’t work she said. I didn’t like to mention that kibbutzim seemed to be flourishing and that the New Testament originals seemed OK with sharing, but perhaps she hadn’t thought that one through.

The art consisted of half a dozen car bonnets, tastefully renovated and a bathtub, somewhat damaged, and standing on its end.

Sadly the car bonnets were Skodas not Trabbies or Zils, but then this was the Czech Republic after all.

Was it art for art’s sake I asked my guide? Or was there some message attached? It turns out that re-cycling is the message, according to my guide.

I intend to revisit the artist on another day. Benedikt Tolar looks deserving of a second chance.

But for today I am reeling from my exposure to a world I thought Le Care and Len Deighton had dreamt up. Now I know different