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Work in progress, and a change of subject matter.
After all this recent talk of Carl Wilde and his extremely camp flower shop I thought I'd give flower painting a go - not having been camp enough to try it in the past - ever.
And while its not yet finished, may I say that its not a bad first effort, I'm quite pleased, and camp.
I also sold a painting yesterday off the minigallery web site, I'd upload some more stuff on there but they are very particular about the quality of the images that you use and the last three times I've tried they have rejected them for being poor photographic reproductions, bastards, still, I renewed for another year yesterday.
Now that the house is decorated with a profusion of the paper flower makers art it was inevitable that I should awaken this morning to the sight of a vase of artificial red roses staring at me from across the bedroom and it was in the first instant of awakening that a song sprang to mind.
Paper Woses by Marie Osmond.
By 1973 The Osmonds had built up a huge fan base causing small girls to riot in the streets wherever they travelled upon the globe, trillions of records were flogged on the back of their youngest member Donny who could make a pre-pubescent female wet herself at fifty yards and turn to a gibbering pile of bone and fat if touched.
The elder brothers were, in the main, quite ugly and wisely stayed in the background pretending to play various instruments while Donny made the audience faint with his young beauty - but the Osmond Brothers held a dark secret.
No, it wasn't Little Jimmy Osmond, he was a secret weapon to be revealed at a later date, it was worse than Little Jimmy Osmond...
The twenty or so Osmond Brothers had a sister.
And they hated her.
They hated her so much than when she had pestered and pestered and pestered their parents to let her sing with the group, and they had refused and refused and refused to let her do so, that they came up with a plan to mark the beginning and end of her showbiz career in one fell swoop.
You see Marie Osmond had a lisp, a very bad lisp.
The letter "R" just didn't exist in her vocabulary, the letter "W" dominated.
The brothers used this affliction to cruel effect.
They recorded her singing the old country tune "Paper Roses", which in Maries case came out "Paper Woses", not just "Paper Woses" but the whole song had been especially selected to make the most of her impediment so that for instance the first verse (Marie Osmond stylee) went something like ...
Paper woses, paper woses,
Oh how weal those woses seem to me,
But the'we onwee imitation,
Like you'we imitation wove fow me...
I wealised the way you'we eyes deceived me...
You get the message, it was cruel and heartless and the suger-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths Osmonds, the virtuous mormon singing brothers band pulled off a superb and damning destruction of their only sister's singing career, made a laughing stock she faded from the popular music charts and took up a TV presenters role instead where she probably made more money than all of her brothers put together.
Its a horrible heartless story which has been subdued by clever spin-doctoring from the Osmond family, but it deserves to be told.
And the fekking song is going to be in my head all day now...
Yesterday I was to be found, avec wife, in Carl Wilde mode, flambouyant tv florist of Castleford descent with a delightfully fey manner that appeals to my feminine side in a totally non-homosexual manner, just in case anyone is getting any wrong ideas.
Carl is never stuck for two hundred words when two will do and all of them delivered in a strange illicit mix of broad West Yorkshire and Julian Clary, "outrageously camp" didn't die with Kenneth Williams, it lives on with flower arrangements included.
So we found ourselves in Wilkinsons in Armley.
Those not of UK extraction will need a description of what Wilkinsons is.
Those not of a Leeds extraction will need a description of what Armley is.
So here goes...
Wilkinsons, or Wilko as their larger stores are called, is what Woolworths used to be when ah wor nobbut a lad - a cheap crap shop, a cheap, useful crap shop it has to be said, but its cheap, cheap as chips, cheap as you get, so cheap that you barely need to take money, cheap so that a whole trolley full of goods will barely break a pound coin, Woolworths without the pick and mix but with all of the elastic snake buckle belts and plastic handbags - you're getting the picture now - knick-knacks that you will never find in any other shop, knick-knacks that you never dreamed you'd need until you saw them in Wilkinsons and now you wonder how you reached this far in your life without them, and cheap too.
Armley is perfectly suited to Wilkinsons. A district just outside of any city centre is bound to be one of the oldest places in that city, the city centre gets redeveloped but the areas just outside of it don't and the areas just outside of any city centre is where the cheap housing was built in ages gone by, communities which for generation upon generation have provided the city with cheap manual labour, blue collar-ville, rough and tough at times and you don't want to walk into some of the pubs without a biker gang escort, but its streets still have local shops as the high street names won't go there, its streets are populated with people who have little in monetary terms but have lots of front to them, they're poor and don't care who knows, they're rough and couldn't give a fook if you know it, if you're not tattoo'ed to within an inch of your life then you're a poofta and thats just the women, Carl Wilde came from this sort of community in neighbouring Castleford, and yesterday I took a little bit of the spirit of Carl Wilde into Armley.
We were shopping for flowers.
Artificial flowers, decorating for the use of, and there is no better place for artificial flowers that are very, very cheap, than Wilkinsons and there is no bigger Wilkinsons than the one at Armley.
So I stood in the aisle in WIlkinsons in Armley, armfulls of big white paper lillies and coloured grasses in Carl Wilde flambouyant reds and pinks, holding them at arms length and admiring them against different backgrounds, getting Suzanne to select various vases and roughly arranging bunches of paper flora on the aisle floor while big butch Armley women stepped over my handiwork and gathered to regard the exhibition with curious eyes, some of them even stopping to look for the first time at paper flowers for meagre brick terrace house decoration purposes, I educated some of the rough women of Armley yesterday and this morning they will be explaining to their roughhouse husbands why they spent his beer money on a bunch of paper lilies and some grass while he blackens their eye for them.
We left Wikinsons with most of their stock of flora and vases, £70 worth of the origami floribundii and in Wilkinsons terms that is one hell of a lot of stock, they may have locked up the store for the day after that for to store that much cash in a shop in Armley is just asking for a ram raid tonight.
This morning our house looks like Carl Wildes boudoir, but it smells of nought, paper flowers make for beautiful permanent visual decoration but add nothing to the olfaction experience - which is the exact antithesis to that which Armley offers to Leeds.
