Chest Freezer

My grandmother loved her garden but was cold to children – her chest freezer was full of babies: gooseberries, raspberries and blackberries, frozen in Sainsbury’s bags, molded into the shape of babies. There was a white tomb in her utility room; when you opened it, it looked like a baby boom: fruit of the tomb, she called it.

Fruit Of The Loom - a clothing company based in Ireland - manufacture bras, and I had a hot-affair in Ireland once: with a fireman’s fiancé - older than me – burned for three nights. I was left with a puffed-out chest an empty bra. No idea I’d hung on to the bra - I’d been home for a week and eventually got around to turning-out my rucksack; must have unknowingly scooped it up with my dirty laundry. It was the smell that hit me – her preserved: more fragrant than Mary Archer, as dirty as Monica Coghlan. Vapour-locked, as Frank Zapper would say. Elvis Costello sang, ‘My Aim Is True’, but it was Costello’s line, “you think your love’s like frozen food, you think it’ll last forever”, that spoke to me - told me to freeze the bra. My grandmother’s chest freezer: it was only right and fitting  - what better place to freeze a bra than in a chest freezer?

OAP inhaling a defrosting bra.

I moved out of teens, moved away from home, moved to my mid-twenties; but the bra remained – a chest holder in a chest freezer - a tiny baby (never filled-out); preserved - like Walt Disney - in a state of suspended animation. Until the morning after the night of the great storms of 1987, when my grandmother phoned: “We’ve had a power-cut, you better get here quick, your bra’s defrosting - along with the fruit of my tomb”. We couldn’t save the fruit but we could saver the bra. We took turns inhaling its dying aroma, out of a baby-bag on my grandmother’s allotment, affectionately known as ‘the bog’.

OFP hanging on to the bra (foetal position aided by chalk, not baby powder).

Notes:

Re the infamous Jeffery Archer and the prostitute court case (at the time of my Irish affair): The Guardian reported: Monica Coghlan was the greatest victim of Jeffrey Archer’s lies. Her involvement with him left her reputation forever tarnished; like Christine Keeler her name became synonymous with prostitution, but unlike Keeler there was no glamour in her trade, no Snowdon to take her portrait.

According to Mr Justice Caulfield, trial judge at Archer’s infamous 1987 libel action, Coghlan provided “cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel room”.

He called her piteous, and she was portrayed as the apogee of vice, in contrast to Mary Archer, apparently the embodiment of virtue (the Judge went further, he called her ‘fragrant’). The stain stayed with her for the rest of her life: 14 years later in her home town of Rochdale people still whispered behind their hands when she went shopping.

The words, vapour lock, inexplicably punctuate Zappa’s wonderful, ‘Jewish Princess’ (Sheik Yerbouti, 1979).

'Love’s like frozen food’, comes from Costello’s ‘Uncomplicated’ (Blood and Chocolate, 1987). 

The Preserve of...

If they hadn’t have been voting to ban the burka, in Belgium today; and if the actor Lorne Green’s middle name hadn’t have been Hyman, I might have left this most mysterious of ‘found’ negatives, unprinted and in the dark, forever.

Barthes states, "the photograph becomes ‘surprising’ when we do not know why it has been taken…" Some years ago I found (rescued?) this 5x4inch black and white negative from the ‘lost student negative box’ of a college darkroom. The fact that it was found in an educational establishment suggests that it was made to fulfill a photographic brief. We don’t have the recipe (brief), and we don’t know whether the image was considered a success (its possible abandonment suggests not); but we can consider the ingredients:

A bed of oats

An unidentifiable vessel covered in cling-film

Large preserving jar covered with greaseproof paper

Half a hand

A bit of thigh

Two eyes (no face)

Two onions (hairy)

The desire to preserve is at the core of all photographs, but this is still a difficult image to penetrate. The cling-film could have been standing-in for muslin (often associated with jars of preserve), and the greaseproof paper - standing-in - for a Sheik: muslin and Muslim – it’s a construct of the ‘student imagination’, remember. The entire image could have been a rehearsal for ‘the real thing’ – whatever ‘the real thing’ was meant to be. The picture seems to be about ‘the act of preserving’, in an unnerving (perving?) sort of fashion. A sealed, concealed image with its intention preserved. And when the photographer took the picture he/she would have had a dark-cloth over his head and have seen the image upside down.

The one-time Goon, Michael Bentine, had a pretty topsy-turvy view of the world, and the closest I can get to this ‘lost preserve’ is an image from Bentine’s children’s TV programme, ‘Potty Time’ – a strange puppet-theatre show from the mid 1970’s.

Frank Zappa wouldn’t have banned anything even though the American media were always banning him. His brilliant album, ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ (1979), comes to mind. Zappa was as topsy-turvy as they come – he sang about dental floss - and might have gone on to pen a song about cling-film, if he hadn’t died so young.

And Belgium has a nerve - trying to ban the burka. Rene Magritte - their most famous son and export (after Stella Atois) - made several surrealist paintings of women whose faces are hidden beneath fabric.