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Bedeviled by aunties

auntfan.jpg

I’ve started and abandoned several posts tonight. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice, I guess. So, here…here’s a picture of something.

Who is she? No idea. She has a sweet face, hasn’t she?

Years ago, I had a friend who was a photographer; his work sometimes took him abroad. When it did, I looked after his cats for him. He paid me with bits of junk he picked up in his travels. I love me some bits of junk.

There’s a flea market in London he liked particularly (note to self: why have I never been to this alleged flea market in London?); picture frames were something I liked particularly (I like to start with the frame and then paint the picture for it). Hence, this.

Only, he bought it with the photograph in. And every time I tried to throw the picture away — or at least take it out of the frame — I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t. What if this is the last vestige of this lady on earth? What if I toss it and there’s nothing left to prove she even existed? It would be like she never was. Like I’d wiped her right out of human history with my own fair paw. That’s a heavy burden to hand a weasel.

So she lives on my sideboard, next to my actual family. There are no notations on the photo (people! Be kind to the strangers who inhabit the future! Write names on your stuff!), but the photographer was Edmund Wheeler, 43 Western Road, Brighton.

Brighton! I don’t know from ‘Western Road’ but I’ve left Brighton headed West a time or two. Maybe we crossed paths, Aunt Fan and me.

Aunt Fan. I made that up. And the book she’s reading: it’s Wuthering Heights. She thought it was rubbish. And tosh. She liked to say “rubbish” and “tosh”. She also liked port in the evening. I made all that up, too.

You live with somebody else’s Auntie on your sideboard for twenty years, you have a right to her biography, I say.

May 31, 2007 — 5:20 pm
Comments: 17