by Robin Gunningham Is Unmasked and Apparently So Am I
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Banksy Has a Name and My Love Life Has an Explanation
Right. So Banksy is Robin. Robin Gunningham. Fifty-one. Bristol. Renamed himself David Jones at some point, which is the most English sentence I have ever read and I read the terms and conditions on my gym membership.
I found out on Tuesday morning, approximately forty minutes after finding out that the man I went on three dates with last month had an entirely separate personality on Instagram. At least Robin had the decency to use a stencil. My situationship used Hinge filters and what I can only describe as creative biography.
The Mystery Was the Point, Darling
There is something I understand about Banksy now that I did not understand before: the mystique was structural. Take away the anonymity and you have a middle-aged man from Bristol with a spray can and strong opinions about the surveillance state. Relatable, honestly. Half of my ex-boyfriends fit that description. None of them were nearly as interesting as they thought.
I wrote about this on Londonish and the response was, shall we say, enthusiastic from the demographic of women who have also dated men who turned out to be considerably less mysterious than advertised.
The Guardian’s Banksy coverage calls this a “watershed moment in British cultural history.” I call it a Tuesday. Bohiney has a piece on Sarah Ferguson this week that covers similar territory: the gap between the image and the actual human being is, in the British context, always funnier than the image suggested.
