A Fishing Trip

I told everybody my tee shirt was ‘scratch and sniff’. It wasn’t. Good job nobody wanted to scratch me. But before long I started scratching myself: the photographic transfer was rough and stiff… gave me a nipple rash. Had to make a sort of bra out of duct tape.

Anyway, I wasn’t happy with the picture, I thought I could have ‘caught him’ better. Assuming this was his local fishing pond, assuming he sniffed around here often, I returned a few days later armed with a dead fish. And it was a boiling hot day.

Dressed in the tee shirt, nipples braed with duct tape, I walked slowly along the row of parked bikes, rubbing the dead fish along the top of every seat. The smell of the fish, I figured, would hold his attention - produce a look of surprise (happiness?) on his face – long enough for me to get a ‘good’ photograph. But never mind his face, you should have seen the look on the fish’s face after I’d rubbed him into the seventh bike seat! Then, Leica poised, I waited… and waited… and waited.

My sniffer, he never turned up. But as the cyclists began to return to their bikes I started to feel self conscious in my tee shirt. And anyhow, the best vantage point to take pictures now, it would have been from the air – a balloon – above the city; images of a Tour de France like peloton, snaking its way towards the sexual health clinic.