Exercise

The cyclist looked happy but progress up a not very steep hill seemed rather slow and painful.

Today's first listen will not be everyone's cup of tea: Californian punk band The Dead Kennedy's 1982 album "Plastic Surgery Disasters" on which my favourite track just had to be Government Flu. The song begins:

We got a drug
We're gonna try it out on you
Won't make you die
It'll getcha just a little bit sick.

By way of a complete contrast, Carl Spitzweg's 1839 painting The Poor Poet is reckoned to be Germany's favourite painting.  Three versions of it were completed: one is privately owned, a second is in Munich but the third was stolen from Berlin's Charlottenburg palace in 1989 and has not been seen since.

The painting is ambiguous.  It was painted in the Biedermeier period (1815 - 1848) during which the former feudal style of government had been reinstated.  Citizens once more became subjects and many withdrew into the private sphere, of domestic tranquility.  Is the painting, of a poet lying down in a cold, wet apartment a satire on the futility of such a life?