A few years ago I found myself in that Macbeth-like state of "I have lived too long". The trigger for this despairing feeling was reading that a world-record price for an oil painting had just been paid in a NY saleroom: not for a Van Eyck or a Signorelli, a Botticelli or a Leonardo, a Guardi or a Canaletto, even a Picasso or a Matisse ~~ but for a Vladimir Tretchikoff; he of the green-faced women.

World record. Tretchikoff. Got to be time to go. Farewell cruel world...

This has been brought back to me by this very morning's Times, in the context of the news that someone had been arrested for defacing one of his works [tho, as a feature writer asked yesterday, how could they tell?], the highest price paid at auction for a C20 artist [presumable thereby outdoing even that blasted Tretchikoff], was for a Rothko.

Oh God! Oh well -- I am 80 now...

So -- what comparatively trivial but important-to-you manifestation of modern life fills you with that sort of "oh what's the use!" existential despair?

~Michael~