29/04/2012
Following lengths of beard up the garden path I found the green man and and his woman (although she professed her independence) sat in the tangled greenery like unexploded bombs wearing hair nets. I tiptoed past the detonators in search of large bags to put my artificial children in. I then spent a couple of hours putting light bulbs in the blank face of Argus before switching them on to an accompaniment of fireworks splish splashing overhead. A giant metallic figure stepped out of the building site opposite our house just before June and I went out to dinner (the figure receded into the distance swishing at rising hot air balloons as it went). On our return we found an island last set foot on by Man Friday.
30/04/2012
As the day broke like a messenger wrongly shot on a doorstep I balanced my reflection on a knife edge and straightened a length of railway track instead of a tie. I had already found footprints right across my water meadow t-shirt; but as I had to go out I never bothered to follow them – June rang some time later from beside a watering hole in the Serengeti. She had caught a lion while I had caught the train. I ran down the platform at my destination with several suitcases full of tadpoles and a pond in which to put them. I spent much of the afternoon reaching up before sitting down from my return journey. On entering the house June was watching a tiny figure on the top of the TV who was threatening to jump.
01/05/2012
I woke with my ocean liner head slowly sinking; quickly drawing a life raft called Medusa I came ashore wearing a mermaid’s dress and tights (I never wondered about the tights until later). June was taking swimming lessons in a washing machine as I walked by the blinded cyclop’s door – although I had a firebrand in my hand I never knocked . Coming home with an arm full of semaphore railway signals I noticed the lady with a steam train face had stopped at the station. I put my umbrella on the stand dressed like a Carmelite monk and then ascended into my third stage studio. Sat on my porcupine chair I agonised over how many open and closed eyes to put on the peacock tail shower curtain.
02/05/2012
I had a breakfast of typewriter keys and the sticky numbers I had found behind the sideboard while looking for a mandolin to comb my hair with. I then went out in the garden to catch up on the house sparrow news. The ten people at the door had green bottle heads – I accepted a package from the first one and signed the others before sending them back. While the grey clouds settled into comfortable sofas, pantomime horses ambled down the street followed by pantomime camels and giraffes with their necks on fire – I put these out with a swish of my collection of candid Polaroid photographs: the knees of Vestal Virgins and mismatched football socks on the limb spurs of boa constrictors.
03/05/2012
The people with unicorn horns were already hidden in the closet when I got out of bed wearing a baseball hat and a strategically positioned sward of artificial grass. June had taken her golf clubs to work and I padded about the house in my brown bread slippers drinking a mix of mead and cordyline sap from an antique conch shell. After swimming with turtles in a Beatrix Potter egg cup I retired to my studio with a can of woad and several Ancient Britons. King Arthur was a pop singer on an Anglo Saxon radio station although I turned over to listen to the World Service. In the evening June and I walked with Poppy along the crocodile path to see a young girl wearing a stethoscope – I didn’t think it suited her.
04/05/2012
I got out of the wrought iron cocoon very early (incidentally I call the cocoon HMS Dreadnought as it was the first of its kind and will soon start an arms race). Once out on the sleepy road I followed a numbered petal trail to the front door of the old man and his shop of mechanical sheep happily grazing on a stone tortoise’s back (the alternative reality which is only a cigarette paper away from ours had me following a cloven hoof trail to Pan – I called myself Peter and flew away). After Jack and I had planted the runner bean seeds I came home in a Spanish Galleon called the Sir Francis Drake. The dog was behind the door wearing a highwayman’s hat; she pointed to a mail coach with funerary urns instead of passengers.
05/05/2012
I meant to get up early but got tangled up in the wreckage of a Junkers 88 brought down in the Battle of Britain – I had already made friends with an ack ack gun from the same war (which had unsuccessfully auditioned for a part in an Oscar Wilde play). I finally got out of bed with a headless figure from the Elgin Marbles balanced on the white bowler hat I was wearing. As the cat wanted bath salts I had to go shopping after a point to point dinner. The lady behind the counter gave me a new head to put on; after placing a third on top I flashed red, orange and green and stopped the traffic – the outlaw in the centre of the roundabout was adding smoke to his gun while the posse sat on the telephone wires like a message in Morse code.
