Poet Mouse

The Poet Mouse

“This street will become a shrine, and punks and skins and rastas will all gather round and hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader. And all the grown-ups will say, “But why are the kids crying?” And the kids will say, “Haven’t you heard? Poet Mouse is dead! The People’s Poet is dead!”

And then one particularly sensitive and articulate teenager will say, “Other kids, do you understand nothing? How can Poet Mouse be dead when we still have his poems?”

This is what will be said of Poet Mouse in coming years but whilst his work lives on he will live in our hearts…

There we were, just minding our own business, when we hear a series of barely audible little squeaks that were somehow coalescing into intelligible words right in front of us. After casting round we found this little fella reciting Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott‘ to us. Once he’d finished we had a small chat and he said he was an urban poet but due to his diminished size had a bit of trouble getting an audience together although he had some fantastic material. I can only hope he gets the attention he deserves. He was a very modest and friendly fellow so keep your eyes out for him, till next time my friend…

I’ve started today’s post with an (altered) quote that I feel is particularly relevant to Poet Mouse. A prize to anyone who can tell me where i nabbed it from…

Cheers

id-iom

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The mirror crack’d

In what i’m hoping will be my last post of the day we have this slightly odd commission. I’m not entirely sure how the mirror came to broken (i.e. I’m not the one with seven years bad luck!) but as soon as it was brought in for us to evaluate exactly I knew there was something just crying out to be put on there. We could not try and hide the crack as it would then look even worse than it did already so we thought the best thing to do was to highlight it’s imperfections.

The line ‘the mirror crack’d’ was floating around in my head and it turns out ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side‘ is the name of an Agatha Christie book starring the unflappable amateur sleuth Miss Marple but she originally got the line from a poem by Lord Tennyson called The Lady of Shallot and it seemed to fit perfectly:

“Out flew the web and floated wide

the mirror crack’d from side to side”

Once we’d found a suitable font, cut a couple of stencils and also got a couple of lightly glittered arrows on there to really put all the attention on the crack we realised that we had job done and to do any more would risk ruining it so we decided it was time to down tools. I’m particularly happy with the result as i managed to restrain myself before adding more and in hindsight it just fits perfectly. One more happy punter taken care of…

For reasons that are hopefully completely apparent it’s pretty tricky to photograph a mirror whilst: a) trying to make the mirror look relatively normal shaped b) trying not to get yourself or any other objects that just attract the eye in shot c) trying to highlight the big crack running across the mirror and the text either side of it. Now whilst i’m certainly not saying that Duffy, Donovan or Bailey couldn’t do better I think I did a pretty reasonable job considering my usual level of skill with a camera.

Cheers

id-iom

detail shot