Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, in a recent essay offers twenty "Reasons to Feel Cheerful about the [Olympic] Games", of which the penultimate is the poetic:

19. As I write these words there are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised by Canaletto. They are glistening like wet otters and the water is plashing off the brims of the spectators' sou'westers. The whole thing is magnificent and bonkers.

Why can't our politicians use such imagery and allusion? (OK, Lincoln did, but that was a while ago.) Canaletto was a landscape painter who moved from Venice to London in the 1700's. And "plashing", and "glistening like wet otters"? Indeed, magnificent and bonkers!

^z - 2012-08-04