Anyone seen the Dali exhibition yet?  Good luck to you if you have. Both times I’ve been the crowds, corralled in small rooms with curved walls, have obscured practically everything.  All I’ve got are snippets: a lobster, some breasts in pencil, the head of a swan, a crazy ballet.

My eyes no use for meeting him, I fell back on my ears. And on the audio tour narrated by a man with the Daliesque name, Anton Enus, I heard a couple of pearls about Dali’s time in America.

When he arrived in New York in 1934 a huge crowd had assembled at the dock. Dali emerged with a two metre loaf of bread that he’d “prepared for the occasion,” trailing the strings from his fingers he’d tied to the paintings to ”ensure their safe arrival.”  His favourite item of clothing in this period was one of his own design: the “Aphrodisiac Coat.”  A black dinner jacket, it contained 88 liquer glasses filled with crème de menthe and a “dead fly and a cocktail straw” in each.

Image: Self-portrait with the Neck of Raphael, 1921 (courtesy of Virtual Dali).