Fragment – Farmers’ Market Diary

A snippet I found lurking on Google Drive, part of a project that (like so many) apparently started with a certain sparkle but failed to live long enough to have a part 2. It’s maybe three years old. Liz is in Dublin now, and I haven’t seen much of Heidi since, but here it is.

Saturday was the Farmers’ Market, of course, which meant coffee with Liz.  Liz is the closest friend I’ve made since moving to Willunga.  She’s a midwife, an academic, and a witch and occasionally, I suspect, more of each of those things at the same time than she can easily integrate.  I am sure that she wouldn’t baulk at a little sympathetic magic over the neonates, and I have a feeling that faculty meetings could be quite interesting, too.

It was a sunny morning, the day was full of promise, and we were at the market early enough to watch it come to life around us, so we quite naturally fell to talking of all the ways we were fucked up by our parents, and all the more significant ways we are fucking up our own children.  From there we fell, by turns, into a wide ranging exploration of psycho-sexual development and the differences between men and women.  I spoke, quite poetically I thought, about the seeming self-containment of women, and of the very different male experience, at least as observed from the inside.  I tried to convey the deep, driving urgency of the male sexual need – its power, its everpresence, the hunger, the frustration. Liz bought me a cup of coffee.

We chatted briefly with a new acquaintance, Heidi.  Heidi is an artist, medium paint and pencil, who lives in the Arts Eco Village, a nearby demicommune whose chief claims to ecological sensitivity are communal recycling bins and roads made deliberately narrow and windy, so that one doesn’t see the skateboarding child until it is too late.  Before you have time to react he has done a handstand on your bonnet, tagged your rear bumper with indecipherable hieroglyphics and released a hip hop album.

Heidi is working on a new project intended to explore and celebrate the mature male form.  Seeking to break out from the usual study of male life models, who are all apparently about 20 years old and come to the studio straight from the weights room at the gym, Heidi is looking for men of a more generous figure who are willing to be drawn and painted in the outfit they were born in.  She tells me that the car bonnet she is planning to use is not usually too hot first thing in the morning, and the subject’s modesty will be preserved by the tasteful placement of a range of light weaponry.  Any volunteers can contact me via the website.


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