Roll up. Humans for sale. We will buy your labour. We will buy your joy too. We will buy your parping horn, your triumphalist songs. We will, let us make this clear, buy your feelings. So dance for us. Show your passion for the project (or lose its associated privileges). Because make no mistake: those tender feelings, the urge to feel and express pleasure, to interact with the spectacle, are now property of the state of Qatar.
There is something genuinely jaw-dropping about the story that 40 England fans – including members of the England band – and 40 Wales fans are being paid by Qatar to attend this month’s Fifa World Cup; a sense, common in the last few years, of reality starting to fray at the edges.
