TorchYourself.com is born

 

Clayed Moira on left, try it yourself. Don't try the one on the right

“See that woman in Sainsbury’s”, said the spouse as he spread some funny looking paté on a piece of toast yesterday, “the one that torched herself on the checkout? She’s a right nutter. I mean, you go up to the till with your basket, right, and she’s looking at you as if…”

“Torched herself?” I interrupted, suddenly showing a morbid interest in what had previously been an extremely dull conversation. “Why did she do that?” I had just been having great fun claying myself on clayyourself.com, but I couldn’t see anyone having much fun torching themself.

“…What?” said the spouse, losing his thread.

“You said: that woman, ‘the one that torched herself in Sainsbury’s'…”

“…Eh?” said the spouse, “don’t know where you got that from.”

“Think!” I commanded. I was going to have to walk him through the last sentence without risking him going right back to the start of the story. “You said: ‘see that woman in Sainsbury’s, the one that torched herself’… “

“Christ!” wailed the spouse, “Talks to herself. TALKS. TO. HERSELF.”

The Eagle Has Landed

Bird by Kevin Andrew Morris. Duct tape by 3M

The spouse has finally been re-united with the tiny bird sculpture he bought at the degree show opening night. It flew in to the office in a polystyrene cup with my name on it and it’s very pretty as you can see. Back in June, I was rather worried at the ease with which I could mistake a lump of discarded duct tape for a ceramic sculpture of a bird that I had only seen for a couple of minutes, but now that I see the two together for the first time, I’m rather impressed by the similarity.

Just in case there’s anyone out there who’s even more visually challenged than I am, the lump of duct tape is the one on the right.

Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?

I awoke this morning to the joyous sounds of a mug of coffee being placed on the bedside table and the telly flicking on. I rubbed my eyes and watched enraptured as the BBC Scotland news report effortlessly segued from the weekly rundown of the weekend’s stabbings to an image of what looked like a fossilised shortbread biscuit.

The biscuit turned out not to have come from a tartan tin with a picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie on it, but from a Neolithic site on Orkney. It is, in fact, The Orkney Venus. She’s carved from sandstone and, according to Historic Scotland, is the oldest representation of a human form ever found in Scotland and shows the earliest depiction of a face from anywhere in the UK.

Crikey, she’s no looker I thought, and I feel I’ve seen that face somewhere before…

Doppelgangers Agogo

Me and Schubert were having a nice train journey to work this morning, when I spotted someone further up the carriage who looked very like my brother. The resemblance was quite uncanny and I gave him a thorough eyeballing as he read his newspaper, just to make sure it actually wasn’t him. Some sixth sense eventually caused the brother imposter to look up, so I quickly averted my roving eyes to avoid detection. I wasn’t quite quick enough, though, and it was now his turn to stare at me. I wondered if he was thinking that I looked a bit like his sister. An inner voice said helpfully, “No, he just thinks you’re a weirdo” and I was forced to stare intently out the window for the rest of the journey to prove that I wasn’t.

As I got off the train, I cringed at the memory of another case of mistaken identity earlier in the week, at a conference. On that occasion, I had introduced myself a little over-enthusiastically to a puzzled, shaven-headed bespectacled man whose name badge said David, after mistaking him for the shaven-headed bespectacled keynote speaker, whose name badge also said David. If I hadn’t told him how wonderful his speech was I might just have got away with it.

As I walked through the station, mind elsewhere, my eyeballs were now on autopilot, but had decided of their own accord to fixate on a well-dressed blonde woman standing outside a shop. She looks kind of familiar, I thought. Yes, she looks a bit like Catherine in the design office. What a co-incidence. Funny that, all these lookalikes one after the other. The woman waved and I turned round to see who she was waving at. Maybe she thinks I look a bit like someone she knows, too, wouldn’t that be funny? She waved again and shouted something and, just that little bit too late to stop, I suddenly realised that it actually was Catherine from the design office.

Roll on the weekend, I think I must be a bit tired.