We, the audience

We, the audience To Charing Cross and the RSA for a lecture on Parliamentary spaces: politics, power and artistic licence, booked out. Barbara Heinzen and Oby Obyerodhyambo made an effective case for the urgency of a worldwide conversation about the global commons, and distinguished from their own backgrounds the kinds of preconceptions and positions that have to be abandoned for such a conversation to produce anything. But the tone of the responses was set by the chairwoman — How did you come to choose this format? — and we the audience engaged with the lecture’s form and not its substance. We need a planetary parliament, urgently, and — we thought mauve for the wallpaper? A great success, apparently.

Dining with my Fellows at the Society’s restaurant had been recommended, but the Vaults were closed, and we wandered north to stumble across Porters in Covent Garden, now a quarter-century since my previous visit. A humbler Rules, they gave us a restorative dinner, the kind of comfort food to put paid to Miki’ still wheezing cough.