March 7th - March 13th 2005
Sunday Pearls, swine
Saturday Eye eye
Friday Eagle eye
Thursday Kings, Queens
Wednesday Hawkeye
Tuesday Wabbit
Monday Notorious
Sunday 13th March 2005
On my rare Saturdays off, I always aim to go to Borough Market. (Ideally, about 3.30 in the afternoon, when they start selling things off cheap - "Half price fish! Half price fish!")
And sometimes I do go, and come back laden with quality produce that you just can't seem to get in supermarkets any more: proper bread, smelly cheese, decent chicken, fresh herbs.
Plus at least three or four things purchased purely for their novelty value: fresh turmeric, Mexican cocoa, Sirop Mandarine aux Epices.
And, yes, the occasional item that just looks too pretty to leave behind, like these baby aubergines.
Saturday 12th March 2005
Note the pair of spectacles featured below.
Note in particular:
the overall battered and speckled patina
the right bridge support has been replaced by a button, attached to the frame with...can it be Blu Tack? (Yup.)
there is only one arm, (unless the other one is hiding behind...nope, they only have one arm)
the arm is fixed to the frame not with the conventional small screw but with..can it be fuse wire? (Yup, 13 amp.)
the arm appears to be only loosely attached, given that it has turned itself upside down.
From the age of nine through to about six years ago, I wore spectacles almost every moment of my waking life. Complicated, relatively expensive spectacles - because I have one very short-sighted eye, and one very long-sighted eye. (A sign of superior intelligence, you won't be surprised to hear.)
And, for most of that time, I enjoyed myself wearing glasses: I actually think I looked more attractive with than without, not least because they camouflaged the bags (suitcases, cabin trunks) beneath my eyes.
Six years ago, sat at a bar, not even remotely drunk, I - not for the first time - applied light force to the arm of my glasses in yet another attempt to bend it tight enough to hold the glasses securely on my head.
And the arm snapped.
So that was when I stopped wearing glasses permanently. Who needs 20/20 vision anyway? And, who knows, maybe it's true what they say, about men don't make passes at chaps who wear glasses...
For times when I truly had to see properly (at the computer, mostly) one-armed glasses proved surprisingly effective, certainly effective enough to militate against the idea of spending, what?, £200 or more on a new pair.
Wearing them in public was completely out of the question, of course. Which meant that, when the bridge-piece fell off, I had no compunction in replacing it with a shirt button. (You have a better suggestion?) And the idea of using Blu tack, combining adhesion with conformability, struck me as little short of genius.
As did the concept of using fuse wire to replace the screw that went missing on the other arm. (Why not simply get another screw? Because the armature was now so bent out of shape that no screw would do.)
Things got a little more challenging when I stopped working for myself and started working amongst other people. But I told myself nobody would notice.
And indeed they didn't. Or not until things got so bad that, at several times throughout the evening, an injudiciously sudden turn of my head would result in my glasses, such as they were by now, jumping off my face and clattering onto the desk.
Whereafter I had to spend ten minutes bending things this way and that to find just the exact tilt and swivel of arm and frame that would enable me to look, at least approximately, through both lenses simultaneously.
'Characterful', I call it.
And people started to notice. Which meant I had to develop a cheerful routine about the exorbitant cost of spectacles nowadays. And about how, given that even when things were working properly I seemed to have lost the ability to read the big numbers of the front of buses, I suspected I was going to need bifocals, how..ageing.And so on. And so forth. All the while desperately manipulating dangling shards of nicotine stained glass and metal.
Elaborate excuses for procrastination are something of a speciality of mine, and these worked for a while: up to and including a kind colleague ordering his wife to bring back a selection of cheap frames from Pakistan for me, which he then refused to take money for.
You remember my mystery appointment of a month or so ago? That was me finally getting round to having a fresh eye-test.
But, enough already, more of that another time...
Friday 11th March 2005
Spooky premonitions from a 1961 Eagle Annual, number two:
Thursday 10th March 2005
The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea
Wednesday 9th March 2005
Altogether conscious of the occult erotic appeal of the books we pored over as children, you can be sure I've been leafing with particular care through the pages of the 1961 Eagle Annual I retrieved from My Other Home at New Year.
Not much there, sadly - though, if you really squint, you may be able to squeeze a little sub-text from this rare shot of Digby confronted by a semi-naked Dan Dare:
But never mind that, what the hell is going on in this illustration for the first short story in the book ("Hawkeye without his glasses sees through the convict's bluff")?
A full twenty years before the New Romantics, our hero's brother Ken (right) has suddenly turned into Julian Clary. WTF?
Tuesday 8th March 2005
Looking for that perfect Easter present?
Had you considered a disembowelled rabbit?
More precisely, how about a 'Cybernetically Engineered Cloned and Nanonised Rabbit', one of Marc Quinn's new sculptures, cast in silver and available in a limited edition of 100 from eyestorm, priced at just £480?
(Sadly, you're too late for Mother's Day - "Oh. Thank you dear. What is it, exactly?")
Monday 7th March 2005
Those of you consistently tempted to translate
She's sick of that song on how it's so long
as
Your current love interest no longer wishes to hear your fabrications about the length of your member
will appreciate this translation of One More Chance from Notorious B.I.G.
......previous week
