This week, London’s mayor Ken Livingston delivered a proposal for the city’s “cultural strategy.” And…. “I spent a dreary weekend ploughing through ‘London: Cultural Capital’s’ 170-odd pages, all of them replete with the cliches of the current culturespeak. Meaningless pleas for excellence, creativity and access abound. Innocent trees have been felled to provide the paper on which Ken laboriously explains how he wants London to be green and prosperous, and its cultural diversity to be respected. The art of stating the bleeding obvious lives on in strategies and this one is jumping with it. Beyond the waffle, what is proposed?”