new house, new life, new town

compelling and entirely wrong

Thank you again Graham Linehan. YOU are delightful!

At this very moment, I love this more than anything.

From Scopitones.com.  Thanks again BoingBoing.

Loss

Yesterday I discovered through an article in the New York Times that Parisian ‘taxidermy establishment’, Deyrolle burnt down this February past.

I took this picture there in 2004. Deyrolle is one of my favourite memories from my time in Paris, and the photos I took are certainly some of my favourite Paris images too.

My friends Stella and Niall were visiting from Edinburgh and we framed our day with long walk from a Metro station at the top of Rue de Bac, back to the Cité where I was staying. The walk took us from an exhibition by Pierre et Gilles in a really great commercial gallery to an awesome food court (miniature cartons of quail eggs – like eggs for dollies), to the chapel of the miraculous medals (dead nuns in glass boxes around the alter and kindly live ones pressing the BVM medals into our hands) as well as Deyrolle itself and the Museé d’Orsay. When other friends go to the Cité (or just Paris), a walk down Rue de Bac is the ‘wonderful thing’ I remember to advise people to do.*

Deyrolles owner, Prince Louis Albert de Broglie (who the NYT inform me also created a national conservatory with 650 varieties of tomatoes at his chateau) had neglected to insure the shop and 90% of the animals were destroyed. The building, however remains intact and he has founded a ‘Friends of Deyrolle’ to raise money and pull together a new collection of stock. Fashion house Hermès has reissued one of it’s famous scarves in a limited edition to help fill the coffers.

There’s a tiny photo album of a few of my Deyrolle pix HERE on Facebook if you’re interested.

P.S. The link to the album is supposed to be public but I don’t quite believe FB on this. If you don’t have a FB account and you can’t see the album without creating one, would you let me know?
Cheers.

*Dear Mish and Tricky – time and life was so crazy before you left I think I blubbed ‘Rue de Bac, Rue de Bac!’ at you with no further information. Deyrolle is gone but there’s other stuff along the way. The nuns are good.

Irregularity= I am the only blogger in the world to miss commenting on… (1)

Even though I’ve been away from here, I WAS paying attention and am very happy and hopeful for everyone.

(T-Shirt from Print Liberation)

This is also not a dream

Once of many, many times I was walking along the waterfront towards Hunter Street. It was one of those days where a storm is in the offing and the sky is simultaneously strangely bright and grey – like it’s been solarised with an 80’s fairlight video effect.

The area was largely deserted and a dog was barking with such a persistent rhythm that my steps had fallen into pace with it and I was so tuned in I could barely hear it for a while.

Approaching Mawson Place, I realised that I could smell smoke. Still neatly tucked away on it’s shelf below the orange public telephone, the Hobart phone directory was in flames. Kind of unreal looking. Kind of surreal looking. Kind of like another 80’s video effect now I come to think of it, a clumsy superimposition.

A large black labrador, the source of the barking, stood facing off against the flaming phone book, persistently coughing out his deep, cycling pattern of WOOF.

As I stood staring – a stupid art student mainlining the visuals straight through the eyeball – a cyclist whisked by and without missing a beat snatched up the phone book and threw it into the river.

Some men on a boat cheered and the lab wagged his tail.

This is not a dream

In 2004 Matt and I were at a market near a coach station in Prague looking at the sort of crap people sell at markets all across the globe. Looking off a little absentmindedly, I was literally jerked back to attention as Matt grabbed my shoulders and physically moved me to prevent a small man from gaining access to my backpack.

He was dwarf-tiny (without being dwarfish), furiously wrinkled and brown. Like a pickled walnut with a face. Not really dark skinned, he just looked completely tobacco stained from head to toe. Foiled at pick-pocketing he then grinned broadly at me, took my wrist in the strongest grip I have ever felt and started to drag me away down an avenue of market tables. I can remember feeling incredulous that this teensy mini-thug had enough strength to haul my bulk away so easily. Matt grabbed my other wrist and after a brief struggle won the tug of war.

Much later at the coach station we split a slab of fried cheese and a pickle, caught a bus to Paris, watched the Charlie’s Angels movie repeat three times and our passports were taken away in a bucket on the German border.

Entomology

A colony of ants has moved into my keyboard. They crawl up my hands as I type.

This is so wrong…

It’s all feeling a bit surrealist film in here but not as many nuns…