Les Gilets Jaunes, The Times Birth Column

                                                          Les Gilets Jaunes

La Pierre d'Avignon, Le Lavando, Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), Manchester Art Gallery

The gilets jaunes include people at the bottom of society, the unemployed, the marginalised but more typically they are people who are above the bottom but think they should be doing better. They are people with low paid jobs or pensioners or artisans or small business people or technicians or people at the lower level of the caring professions.

This mixture of supporters explains in part the heterogenous character and demands of the movement which point left and right…There is no coherent ideology, even a refusal of ideology.

The words you hear most are mépris and ras le bol. Mépris means contempt. Gilets jaunes are convinced or have been convinced that the little or middling people like them are held in contempt by the trendy, rich, globally-orientated people of successful metropolitan France…

He (Macron) is the embodiment of the rich, clever, self-replicating people from the governing classes who’ve been to the finishing schools of the governing elite and think they know everything.

The second word or phrase you hear: ras le bol which means sick to the teeth. It conveys a sense of having been pushed to the breaking point.

(The Observer, 10.2.2019)

Who and what else can mépris and ras le bol be applied to in the UK at the present time?

Times Birth Columns

Christ Driving the Money-Lenders from the Temple

Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) (imitator of)

Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND]

Von Halle:

On 19^th February 2019 to Olivia (nee Falconer) and Hugo, a son, Dionysus Cosmo Chaos, brother to Hieronymus.

(Private Eye No 1492) 

             Bosh not Bosch.