Ten Things on Our Wall at Home
This was written for the Dalston Writers audio anthology. 'Home'; which you can listen to in full, including my own reading of this piece, below:
1.
A promo poster for the B-movie ‘NOT OF THIS EARTH’ - the 1988 one featuring Traci Lords, which has a 33% critics rating on RottenTomatoes; not the 1957 one featuring Paul Birch, which has a 36% critics rating on RottenTomatoes, nor the 1995 one featuring Elizabeth Barondes, which has no rating. The one in the middle. This poster, which I snuck into the four-foot-cubed box of your stuff that we had shipped over from your apartment in the States, has the tagline, ‘TRACI LORDS IS... NOT OF THIS EARTH’. Traci Lords was an actor and model who supplied guest vocals for the Manic Street Preachers’ single ‘Little Baby Nothing’, the title of which - that phrase - you have tattooed on your wrist. The Manic Street Preachers were, in some ways, the reason we met - since it happened when you travelled to the UK to see them on tour, in 2002.
2.
A beermat from The Beehive in Peterborough. This one is framed. We went to Peterborough for their poetry festival on a cold weekend, and I was mildly jealous of a young woman who’d been commissioned to write a poem for Peterborough Cathedral. The Cathedral has paintings on its ceiling including a donkey playing the harp, and houses the grave of Catherine of Aragon. The young woman depicted on the beermat is reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn, but it’s definitely not her. She has a beehive on her head. Not a beehive hairstyle, but an actual beehive - with bees. She’s taking it in her stride.
3.
A canvas-work version of LS Lowry’s ‘Coming From the Mill’, bought for a tenner from a charity shop a few years ago. I used to refer to this as a ‘cross-stitch-Lowry’ but was corrected by an expert hobbyist when I posted an image of it to the ‘Terrible Art in Charity Shops’ group on Facebook one Sunday. I don’t actually think it’s terrible at all, just absurd. The canvas-work has the effect of pixelating the image so that it looks like a still from an unusually messy eight-bit computer game, although the smoggy trudge home from work is such an unlikely candidate for a game. And at the same time, it’s surprising how much seems to have transferred successfully from Lowry’s original. There’s far more subtlety than we’ve any right to expect in the dingy wools used. The sky is in places a pale, almost-grey lime and in others an equally pale, almost-grey peach... these normally complimentary colours made barely distinct from each other, so that you can only tell they’re not the same if you make a point of looking.
4.
A stained glass swallow - a gift from the great pilgrim, Johanna van Fessem. There are many folk-tales about the swallow. That bird has encountered Jesus and the Devil. The latter story makes the swallow a Prometheus among birds, having got its red throat in the course of stealing fire from the devil - who, slinging his trident after it in fury, also gave it its forked tail. This shouldn’t be against the wall! It’s stained glass. It’s meant to have light shine through it. Why is it against the wall? But it does make for a nice composition.
5.
The swallow’s beak points at a postcard made of thin wood, sent to us by friends. The postcard shows an image of the night sky full of stars in a dark blue-green backdrop (let’s call it blackquamarine), the orange embers of the sunset down below them. Below that, lest we were in any doubt, the text reads: ‘The NIGHT SKY’.
6.
A cheerily bright decoration made by our niece Robyn out of four lollipop sticks and some stick-on gems. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts. Its composition has a simple genius, so that it seems there are far more colours there than there really are.
White against wood
Pink against wood
Light blue against dark blue
White against pink, twice
Pink against pink
Gold against pink
Pink, gold, white and silver against dark blue
Amber against dark blue
Amber against wood
Gold and bumpy against wood
7.
A wooden plate that travelled to America with your father’s family when they fled East Germany, and more than fifty years later came back across the Atlantic with us to England. It is engraved with the crest of the town it hails from, Cochstedt - and with the town’s coat of arms, which shows ‘three jumping foxes in confused colours, split in stacks of silver and red’. But the bowl is brown and black, so, so are they. While it was in America with you, your abuser attacked it with a hammer. It still bears the scars.
8.
A print of one of John Tenniel’s classic Alice illustrations, the one at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Alice is telling the Mad Hatter, “You’re entirely bonkers, but I’ll tell you a secret...” It’s close to our bookshelf and sometimes sits in its shadow - every book a rabbit hole to lose the world in.
9.
A cameo of a white rose, on a black background. I got you this in a little vintage shop in Glastonbury. The petals are slightly fragmented, as if we’re peering at a slice of the rose’s porcelain world.
10.
A 2020 calendar of ‘Vintage Burlesque’. We got this in Oxford, on the day we went to plant a tree for couples still separated by the UK’s spouse visa regime - like we once were. I wasn’t going to include this calendar - it’s not on the same wall - but when I told you I was writing this, you asked me if I was including it - and when I said, ‘no, it’s not on the same wall’, you seemed sorry. So here they are. The sexy, sophisticate stars of yesteryear, blessing our every day.
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