No, not me dear. Chance would be a fine thing. There is recent research that has discovered that people with huge thighs live longer than the lean flanked, so that’s all your top models not getting out of bed for less than a heap of money, doing it in a time-limited way. Whereas us chunky-thighed folk will continue to waddle good naturedly to the door at any time of day or night for years and years and years. Of course, the answer could be a built-in to the question: maybe your lanky unwilling riser is unwilling to do anything else for you at all and gets regularly offed by enraged would-be employers, but people are kind and helpful to the cheerfully thunder-thighed well into old age. I am still waiting on health news that is favourable to the short and shrinking. One day there will be science that says it’s the best you can be, to be short with fat legs and straight hair and I will be so IN you’ll be glad to know me. ‘Oh yes.’ you will say, ‘I know her very well. She has often oscillated past under my nose somewhere, cracking a joke.’
My time is yet to come, meanwhile what I have been making that is tall and thin, is cards. There is apparently a vogue for tall thin cards that has nothing to do with rumours put about by paper mills who think they have sold us all the square cards we are going to buy and are yet resisting the blandishments of octagonal envelope manufacturers.
Here, therefore, some of my efforts.
It’s the Ikebana next stage. The Japanese lady’s face is made from a silk cocoon. There’s a man as well
doing some very masculine looking bonsai. These both contain my original watercolour miniature paintings out of the window. In fact out, as a direction, is figuring in everything arty I’m doing at present. I think art is an expression of hope in the same way that science fiction is an expression of fear.
My hope is all about all of us escaping from lockdown.
A small steel rule die of butterflies by Tim Holtz enabled me to cut butterflies from diverse materials. Thick card covered in gilding flakes coming out of the jar.
And alcohol ink decorated acetate that I made years ago but had never been able to cut with thin metal dies,is coming out of the bottle.
Either way it’s all about escaping.
The OH turned 70 a couple of days ago, so we went out on a bit of a shopping trip to Stratford on Avon because it was Shakespeare’s birthday too, Will was 457 and neatly, died on his birthday, some think of the celebrations. We found an orthopaedic shoe shop and I bought the OH some mind-bogglingly expensive shoes and then we went home because my intestines are playing up.
This is the thing about age. Bits drop off as your art improves. Think of the stuff our William might have written if he had lasted a bit longer.
I would never have used a day of my life making one card when I was younger. Each of the efforts above took several days and I have every intention of sending them to people who will probably just bin them. I think it’s worth doing.
I will be following the OH age-wise in a week or so and the way I think is the most noticeable change in me from my youth.
When I was younger I was extremely keen to be tall thin and cool, having failed to grasp that people who invest time in appearance do so because that’s what they’ve got.
I thought the best thing you could do was to earn a lot of money, having failed to realise that the more money you have, the more expensive things get.
I thought the point of art was to be sold and that sales validated the worth of the art.
But that will be the end of the art for a while because I’m back to writing. I know everyone else did a lockdown novel. Lockdown is when I stopped, now everyone is getting out and about I’m sitting indoors scribbling. I’m the antithesis of the tall cool trendsetter with the long lean flanks, striding ahead waving a flag in this year’s Panettone colours.
I am your comically undertall pal with one foot in philosophy, the other in art and the whole self in writing.
Scribo ergo sum.
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