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It was said that it was in the Frogmore that the normative perennial discussions of what might almost have been any wayward peer group gave birth, without recourse to the usual processes of artistic causality as we understand them, to a new awareness, a way of life designed to act as an index to the possibilities of those who followed it. That there was no corpus of favoured subject-matter, no core of cherished ideology. That the deeper subtrerranean strata of artistic aconsciousness they tapped was like the centre of some great stuffed paratha: chaotic and undifferentiated, yet discreet. That they thought the world was ill and they themselves sick. That, philosophically, the production-line as central institution of the manufactory with its ‘end-product’ assumptions, fitted incongruously into Frogmore’s philosophy of non-developmental entropy - a world view which perceives the universe’s tendency to dissolution as a principle so absolute that, firstly, ends - eve ultimately dissolute ends - could not exist; and, secondly, that this ‘absolute’ principle was itself subject to entropic dynamism and could not therefore be enshrined as a principle at all. That Sartre had remarked from his death-bed that to interpret Frogmore as a part of bourgeois European culture was as inappropriate as finding Chicken Biryani on the menu at Maxim’s, wedged between the ortolans and the quenelles. That they were appalled by white liberals casting aside any critical faculty they once possessed and, in the name of racial equality, hailing West Indian youths playing loud American muzak on Taiwanese tape players as a manifestation of African culture on the streets of London, as if this sort of patronising sycophancy were not the worst form of cultural imperialism, of racial abuse to the living civilisations who had created the empires of Nubia and Ashanti. That stood waist deep in bogs, oblivious of discomfort, pondering the nature of reality or, sodden with whisky, waded in pairs through both the damp heather and their own alcohol-induced muscular paralysis, seeking through the ravings of drunken dialectical argument a solution to the conundrum that tormented them. That they would nevertheless, at appropriate moments in the year, hail unwary passersby with a hearty and raucous Yuletide greeting.