Tag Archives: bottled revenge

Shards of Glass….

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….flew across the room when I flicked on the light switch in my studio. The lightbulb had exploded. I sighed and went to the kitchen for a dustpan and brush. Thankfully no glass had become precariously lodged in the ceiling. Those days were long gone. Or were they? Were these frequent near death experiences related to a bygone era? A long-lost plot? An unfinished paragraph that I had begun in 2006? I gazed into the middle distance and looked thoughtful.

Some hours later, after I had finished thinking and looking pretty at the same time, I ascended the stairs to my purpose-built garret at the bottom of the garden. They were still there where I had left them some years previously – a large cardboard box, and an old thick notebook stuffed with diagrams, maps, menus and all manner of paper ephemera. There was nothing more in the garret other than these items. I lifted the flaps on the box, faded, dry, and dusty, and counted the bottles within, there were two missing, which was no surprise. I pulled out the smallest, the first one I’d made. It contained a wax effigy pierced with pins. I rolled my eyes, how stupid of me to make the effigy using my own hair and clothes.

wax-effigy-in-bottle-on-mantelpiece

On my mantelpiece today….

“I had misguidedly seen fit to use my own hair and clothing to produce the wax effigy, all silly superstitious fears had been pushed aside as I dispassionately pierced the effigy of myself with pins.”

wax-effigy-in-bottle-uk

No wonder I have tinnitus….

It seems I had unwittingly cursed myself with misfortune. Thankfully during my long spell of thinking I had had a couple of interesting thoughts. Perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps I was taking these explosive mishaps a little too literally? Perhaps the mishaps were merely signs? Signs to tell me that I was on the wrong track; signs telling me to return to where it all began.

To be continued. Maybe.

Whatever Happened….?

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bottled up revenge

Bottled Revenge

“Whatever happened with the messages in bottles? I am new to this blog – so the answer may be posted somewhere – but I’m not sure what direction to go to find it.” Asked Jean, several posts ago.

As I read the question on my screen a single tear rolled down my cheek from my left eye. My right eye is somewhat lazy, not so prone to gratuitous displays of emotion and thus remained dry. I often think about the bottles and wonder if I should dust them down, discover what they were all about and follow the direction they were taking me. Even Charmaine is now burning with curiosity after she stumbled over them in a blog post way back in 2015. Thankfully her stumbling didn’t cause any breakages. No cuts. No grazes. No electrocutions.
Perhaps it is time to publish some explanatory notes? Perhaps now that everyone has lost interest, now that everyone is fevered with the evils of politics and buffered by the occasional hurricane, perhaps now it is time to examine the bottles in more detail?
Anyhow, it is something to ponder on…something to face.

The Cultural Relevance of The Pearl Necklace (Tales From Filching-under-Luddley, part 1)

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bottle-containing-wax-effigy-with-pins-stuck-in-it-uk

Revenge

As the long nights drew in and then drew out again, the ‘bottle of Greed’, now nothing more than a hazy yet somewhat expensive memory, lay undisturbed. A more pressing concern now consumed me. In my haste, whilst creating ‘bottled Revenge’, I had misguidedly seen fit to use my own hair and clothing to produce the wax effigy, all silly superstitious fears had been pushed aside as I dispassionately pierced the effigy of myself with pins. My bravado may have been misplaced because since the creation of ‘bottled Revenge’ I had unwittingly become the initiator of a series of social blunders leaving those around me, hurt, betrayed, confused and perhaps a bit cross. I began to feel that I had been possessed by a demented demon hell bent on malevolent mayhem.
A fine example of this was my first foray into ‘Bottled People’ (a new and exciting concept at www.wonky-words.com) and involved my best friend, Jules. My brief was to bottle her essence, to create a bottled representation of her character, of her soul, of her very being; to produce an object that reflected her innate charm, poise and sophistication. The pearl necklace bursting through the neck of her bottle is obviously symbolic of her sparkling, frothy personality, an idea conceived in what I believe was a moment pure unadulterated artistic genius.
Jules, inexplicably, didn’t see it this way.

bottle-containing-JPS-cigarette-packet-and-lighter-uk

Bottled Jules

first published 2 February 2007