A Mug with a Dishcloth Nearby

Art, they say, comes in all shapes and sizes. Could this yellow dishcloth which happens to be next to a white mug simply be a symbol of everything wrong with modern society? Or perhaps it is a metaphor for Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, the yellow, snarling cloth coming to clean out the dust from our white mug of political discourse?

This would be nice - beautiful, perhaps even uplifting. However, the dishcloth and mug juxtaposition fails on almost every level.

I mean, look at it. It's raggedy, it's old. It's worn. It's not Nick Clegg clambering up to change our modern politics - no, it's the ghost of the Lib Lab pact coming to give us four more years of the white mug. The white mug which once had some milk in (here the metaphor begins to break down although one could argue the white milk perhaps was Peter Mandleson or possibly, if you were a very poor satirist, "integrity").

Laboured political metaphors aside, what is the most disgusting thing about this whole sordid, desultory cloth/mug liason is the attitude behind the whole thing. Look how lazily the cloth leans over, flirting coquettishly with the white mug's rim. "I could clean you," it seems to be saying. "But that'd be what you want." The White mug couldn't ever be what the yellow cloth wants it to be. But it wants it anyway. They're dirty whores, the both of them. Dirty, filthy, sexy whores. And they want us to use them. To clean with them. To drink from them. Knowing where they've been and what they've done. And you know what? I'm having none of it.

Verdict: Initially I was impressed. Perhaps everything isn't as terrible as I had previously thought. However, the further I delved into the corrupt psyche behind these two titans of perversion, the more I realised that I could not even begin to give them even a whiff of my regard.

Rating: 1.5/10