Art's riposte to financial gloom

Look how threatening the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protesters are. This young woman is painting a bright new floral dawn on her tent. Makes you shiver with fear, doesn't it?

Winter of our discontent

The anti-bankers’ demonstration close to St Paul’s Cathedral looked fine to me when I visited yesterday. The tents are one- or two-person size and are contained in a couple of small areas, a sign requests that no more people join in. The food tent is well stocked, there’s an information tent, a media tent, facilities for First Aid, and rubbish is recycled. I saw a circle of demonstrators just finishing an outdoor meeting: democracy in practice. And the message of anger on behalf of the 99% of us who have been shafted is delivered with a great big dose of Dadaism. Accessibility to the cathedral certainly didn’t appear to be a problem since many people were coming and going. The police were low-key, although one looked bemused when a frantic woman asked: ‘Do you know where the nearest Next is?’