Old Chairs and Guinea Fowl

I am briefly back in London, where I am having a weird time which is 100% due to where my head is at. I arrived back here yesterday afternoon and go back to Leicester tomorrow afternoon. My brain is at war with itself. Yesterday evening it was yammering away at me, telling me all the things that I could have been doing when I got home instead of curling up with a book, which is what I actually did.

Today, the yammering continued and got so loud that in between helping empty the poo tank and filling up the water tank I did so much French practice on Duolingo I got to the top of the leaderboard for the first time. Thinking about the difference between I will do this and I would like to do that, or I used to do this but now I do that in French drowns out the: ‘Here’s the almighty list of all the ways you have failed yourself and let the school down,’ in English.

Berating yourself in French is incredibly hard, which I find quite healthy. Also I learned to say: ‘Jean Paul is Bald like a knee.’ Which I think we can all agree, is going to stand me in good stead next time I go to La Belle France pour mes vacances. If you, too want to be able to achieve the same fluency in French as me, it is: ‘Jean Paul est chauve comme un genou’.

I am better than I was last week, where I was dangling by my last nerve. Even though the brain monkeys are chittering, I am working hard at stepping back from my usual reflexive response to them and attempting to do what will be best for me in the long run. It’s annoying that real self care seems to be very much an effort of will and extraordinary hard work and not just lighting an expensive candle and frolicking about in a litre of Radox. I’d try that too, but I object to setting fire to fifty pound notes for things that overwhelmingly smell like fly spray and that much Radox is only going to end in tears and a urinary tract infection.

There have been moments of great joy and things that have really made me laugh in the last few weeks, so I thought that as an antidote to the brain monkeys, I would capture a few of those times here to remind myself that it isn’t all poo pipes and fucking up the future imperfect tense or whatever the hell tense it is.

Part of the weirdness of my brain is that as well as musical ear worms (currently this) I get ear worms that are words or whole sentences that run like ticker tape through my mind. Sometimes they drive me mad. Sometimes they make me laugh. I read a book about Tracey Emin recently which discussed a 1994 piece she made where she patchworked a chair that belonged to her nan. It’s called: ‘There’s A Lot Of Money In Old Chairs.’

The title got hooked into my brain as an ear worm and I found myself musing on it as I carried on the gargantuan task of sorting out my parent’s garage. While I was beavering away I found a knackered old stool that my dad had bought at auction a few years ago with the intention of doing it up. He never got round to it and now none of us have the time or inclination. As I was photographing the stool and listing it on Facebook Marketplace, my ear worm expanded accordingly.

Now it runs: ‘There’s a lot of money in old chairs, but there’s bugger all money in old stools’. It isn’t very funny really, but in my heightened emotional state I find myself giggling about this quite a lot. If I ever get my own solo show this will be one of the art pieces I exhibit in it and then maybe I’ll be able to make more than a fiver. It’s important to dream big, especially when it comes to furniture.

After I’d been to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, I took some of the postcards I had bought to show my mum. She really liked this one:

While we were looking at it, I said, ‘I think it’s a picture of a Guinea Fowl, but I might be wrong.’ Mum didn’t know either so I suggested she look on the back of the card. ‘What is it called?’ I asked. She turned it over and looked for a moment, then looked back up at me and said: ‘Fiona Watson.’

I laughed so hard it made my belly hurt.

The piece is called: ‘How the Guinea Fowl got its spots’ and the artist is Fiona Watson. You can buy the card from the RA shop, here. The card cost a pound and as well as being a beautiful artwork, it was worth a hundred times that for the laugh.