so far so so-so

At the auction room today I managed to nab four gorgeous churchy oak spiral chairs, and a very lovely watercolour. The chairs are to replace the wrecked ones from a dining suite my mum got at auction about 40 years ago and the last painting I acquired was rescued from a skip where I heard it quietly mewling.

Almost all of my clothes come from charity shops : bags, shoes, evening dresses,...the lot.

Even when dressed to the nines in my glitzy best I take great satisfaction in knowing that the whole kit and kaboodle generally rings up at about a tenner. (Not undies though.....standards you know).

Sadly after a couple of snifters at posh dos I lose my haute couture hauteur and can be heard crowing 'Ho yish! a fiver from Oxfam...get-in !!'

I think it fulfils a deep-seated hunter-gatherer instinct as I also love foraging for hedgerow foods and subjecting the family to wild mushroom and nettle concoctions as they fast-dial Pizza Magic.

It really does give me a buzz.

I might be hard work but can never be accused of being high maintenance.

Cheap date or what ?

I used to be able to sleep on a clothes line.

(The phrase, along with 'I could sleep standing-up' comes from doss-houses where they put up ropes to save space for the poor to drape themselves on by their armpits ). Love, let thy name be charity, eh ?

I find myself in a 24-hours-off / 48-hours-on cycle.

Dammit...I do love my kip....!

Where has it gone ?

If you find Morpheus wandering about your neck of the woods, could you please send him back ?

You'll find the address on his pink rhinestone collar....

His owner is fretting.

There is a reward.

Lord Leverhulme was a grocer's son
He learnt to sell when he was young
And all the songs that he could play
Was 'advertising makes it pay',
Over the hills, across the skies,
By God, it pays to advertise !

We know that the mission of ads is to create desire in us proles to hand over our hard-earned spondoolies in exchange for utter shite. The bigger the corp the more utter the shite and the more money to burn on advertising convincing us that this is the shite we really want.

Job done. But....

Sadler's Wells and the Royal Academy were recently busted by corporate committee at CBS Outdoor HQ. What a busy little group of vetters they must be, having the very wide remit to protect the traveling public from any image which might possibly give offence .

Was it the nudity that was deemed to be 'contextually and overtly' sexual by the moral guardians at the gates of the London Underground ?

The only evident illegal or unlawful activity immediately apparent in either poster is the 'graffiti' style typeface on the poster for street dance 'Insane in the Brain'. (Clockwork Orange hip-hop)

Art is not less subject to the law than anything else.....fair enough. But we are not talking about the law of the land here, these are jobsworth gobshites who's wagging fingers are just begging to be bitten off .

Their idea of obscenity is a classic Cranach nude and a man hiding his dong behind a cuckoo clock, (both images publicising cultural events) because they 'might cause offence', while they gleefully install pics of burgers and other skanky garbage.

So we can consume crap, but never be subjected to art because that would be obscene ? .

And no amount of backtracking can negate the fact that they thought it once and they will think it again.

Oh you art-censoring-nannyish-guardians-of-our-morals...

What are you like !

(Cranach was a good mate of Martin Luther by the way).