Oh dear. I had expected to be out and about again by now, as did we all, even if it did mean wearing the mask and keeping one’s distance, and hardly daring to look at anyone, let alone breathe. But no: here we all still are, stuck at home and doing as
we’re told, good boys and girls to a man, or woman as the case may be – though it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell which is which in these confusing self-identificarious times. And to make life ever more troublesome than it needs to be, there then follows the awkward business, taken with all due care and consideration for the feelings of others – a natural civil duty and obligation after all – of wondering on the most meagre of evidence if we are dealing with a truly delicate plant, a manifest lunatic, or a joke. People do take such offence at the slightest and most innocent provocation, whether imagined or contrived, don’t you find, and we don’t want to end up at the bottom of the river like that lump of old bronze.
At least that genial if tiresome national treasure, Sir (it can’t be long) Cynthia Puppy RA, potter to the stars, doesn’t put us to that trouble. We know perfectly well where we are with him, usually that state of mild embarrassment as when the joke falls flat, yet again. But at least when he’s on the television he seems to prefer to
Where was I? Oh yes, the programme. It was called Cynthia’s Art Club (I speak from fading memory) in which under his eponymous direction the viewer of every hue and cry, talent, description and proclivity, was encouraged to produce what he, and I fear you and I too, moving with the times as we must, would call an ‘artwork’ on the set theme of the week, safe in the understanding, since we are all artists now, that art wouldn’t come into it.
And so it came to pass that every Tom, Dick and Harriet, Sharon, Jim and Wayne, not to mention Malik and Ramon down the road, nor forgetting old Dan Pearce
