GOLLY GOSH!

You may remember the Essex pub which was at the centre of a racism row over the displaying of golly dolls, on the 4th of April this year. Five police officers... "count 'em!"... seized the collection of dolls as part of an investigation into an allegation of hate crime. The building was vandalised with white paint and had its widows damaged on the 16th of  April.

Heineken and Carlsberg told the pub to stop serving its lager, while a maintenance company refused to continue working on site. Camra removed the pub from its Good Beer Guide, and retrieved the Pub of the Year awards on display.

You couldn't make it up... if you did you'd have to use burnt cork!

The collection of about 30 dolls had been donated by customers and the landlady's late aunt. They had been in the pub for nearly 10 years!

I suspect that there were a good number of my generation from the Second World War and before who, when they were tots, would take a golly to bed with them and fall asleep hugging it. How times change!

Any road up… I came across the following recently (see right). Its a display, in an art gallery in Dubai, of the work of an artist by the name of Zak Ové’, who was born in London in 1966 to a black Trinidadian father and a white Irish mother. 

The gallery informs visitors that "Ové seeks to requite and reinterpret a lost African culture with the contemporary present."  They should be on display in pseuds corner!

The illustrations shown left are close-ups of some of Ové's figures in the gallery... what do they remind you of?*

But surely these can't be racist can they?Depends how you look at it, I suppose... or maybe there's more to it than that!

It would take quite a few flatfeet to tackle that lot... double figures probably... but I suspect they will leave them alone.

Maybe its a case of who you are and where you are. I would suggest the playing field ain't  level!