Giraffes Would Make Good Firemen

Re the last blog (First and Last Traverse of the Fireplace): I’m going to offer my next-door-neighbour this ‘lost’ photograph of a headless giraffe, to hang in place of his missing chimneybreast. Look at the legs. They have all the ballet-grace of a Degas. And anyway, this ‘lost’ giraffe is the perfect replacement for a stone fireplace. I’ve counted 227 stones on the fireplace, and I’ve counted 129 patches (is that the right word for them?) on the giraffe. Now the giraffe’s lower-legs are blurred (he’s moving out of the picture), but that works in our favour, as there must be more than a hundred or so tiny patches beneath each knee. But all is not lost. If you count the number of dark stones on the wall of the barn in the background – only counting the stones as dark as the dark patches on the giraffe - the figure comes to 98. Add that to the giraffe’s 129 and you have a total of 227, the same amount as the number of stones that make up the fireplace. Giraffes would make good firemen, too.      

First and Last Traverse of the Fireplace

I followed Perec’s advice, but I didn’t expect to make the first and last traverse of my next-door-neighbour’s fireplace. I’ve lived next-door to an unexplored climbing wall – slept a brick or so away from virgin rock – for years without knowing it. And to think all this time I’ve been pulling (on a bar) in my hall, I could have just popped next door and hung on my neighbour’s wall.  But it’s gone now - the firewall - I had to help him dismantle it, stone by stone. Degas’ The Ballet Rehearsal hangs there now.

I wonder, would it be perverse to blow-up the fireplace traverse – life-size - and paper my sitting-room wall with it (on the other side of the wall on which it once really existed), like a mural? And why not, I smoke a lot? I rather like the idea of a fireplace leaving home - moving house. But looking at it now: I don't think so. The rubber-gloves suggest surgery. The removed chimneybreast looks too much like an operation for throat cancer.