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From blundering tweets to Joe Biden to pimping the Queen’s air ride, why can’t he get anything right?
The sale last week of a gold coin issued by Caratacus, the ancient British warrior who unsuccessfully resisted the Roman invasion, has got me thinking about the branding of doomed British regimes. The coin fetched £80,040 and depicts a naked Caratacus on a horse (also naked). That sounded a bit grim to me. The emperor Claudius, Caratacus’s ultimate vanquisher, never went tackle-out on the currency. Caratacus’s nudey display seems a bit try-hard, a bit Vladimir Putin, although even he tends to keep his trousers on.
To be fair, the image is more tasteful than the description makes it sound – you can’t really see Caratacus’s bottom or penis, though there is, to my eye at least, a suggestion of horse cock. But is this the product of restraint or merely the limitations of late iron age minting technology? Who knows what oiled and rippling hairy-balled vulgarity Caratacus might have commissioned if he’d had access to full-colour 3D printing? So it was probably for the best that this exhibitionist warrior culture was soon to benefit from the restraining influence of a vast pan-European bureaucracy. Continue reading...