Unfocused Parents

Callus Parents

My Daddy's A Handy Daddy

Making Light Work of Quality Street

Dizzy Howard making light work of Quality Street

The Art of Cooking

The Art of Cooking

(Serves one)

Ingredients:

1 family sized tin of Quality Street sweets

1 courgette

1 green pepper

1 yellow pepper

1 tbs olive oil

Season with salt and pepper

Method:

Eat as many of the Quality Street as you can – preferably the entire tin - until you are physically sick. To prepare the sweet wrappers, separate the foil from the coloured film (each individual sweet wrapper). Discard the foil and carefully flatten the coloured wrappers out, individually.

Be sick, then lick, quickly lick each wrapper, before sticking them to the inside of the kitchen window (time is of the essence) making what is effectively a very pretty stain-glass window. Tip: try and be decorative with the pattern – coordinate the colours. Stand back and allow early morning sunlight to filter through sweet wrappers. Admire the sickly effect on the kitchen floor.

Cut the peppers and courgettes into bite-sized chunks; arrange them on a chopping board. At this point the chopping board effectively becomes an artist’s palette. Now comes the difficult bit: arrange the vegetables on the pallet in such a way that they colour and number correspond to the sickly sweet pattern on the floor. When you are satisfied that you have achieved this effect, pop the vegetables in the oven, and go and change into a suitable blouse for breakfast.   

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.  

ICA Performance

Some photographs are so ahead of their time (or in this case, a nose of their seat), that you have to wait until you have grown into to them in order the savour them fully; wait until the future catches up with the past.

To be continued...