The Mizzenwood Times  features

Last week I had the opportunity to spend a day in the company of Mizzenwood�s most famous living artist, Hope �Bippy Bippy Bippy� Boris-Lacrosse. (She explained to me that her nickname used to be �Bippy�, but some people called her �Boppy�, and she used she say to them, �It�s Bippy. Bippy!� So then they started calling her �Bippy Bippy�, and then �Bippy Bippy Bippy�, and then �Bippy Bippy Bippy Bippy Bippy�, but that was too long, so they settled for �Bippy Bippy Bippy�, but some people still call her �Boppy�).

The story of Hope�s artistic career begins in her aunt�s garden. This garden became famous because the flowers outside the front window used to change colour when no one was at home � they went from red to blue. This was a problem because burglars just had to look at the flowers to see if the house was empty. Hope�s aunt and uncle solved this problem by buying blow-up dolls and putting them in the front window every time they left the house, and this had the desired effect initially. The flowers were fooled for a few weeks, but then they started turning green whenever the dolls were alone in the house. This caused problems too � it told certain other people when to call. A prominent local politician was caught in their house once. He claimed he was just canvassing for the next election, and he left his glasses at home so he thought the dolls were real. He says he was only going through his Party�s manifesto with them. Most people believed his story, but there was a much bigger controversy a few weeks later when it was found that the dolls had voted for him in the election. He insisted that it was because he had impressed his opinions on them so forcefully, and that even inanimate objects can see that his Party�s manifesto was far superior to blatant electioneering of the other side. Most people accepted this story too.

When Hope was twenty she broke her ankle, and she got all her friends to sign her cast. But when the cast was removed, she missed the signatures, so she got people to sign her foot instead. One of her friends was called Ralphabet Street, but he didn�t use that name when he signed her cast and her foot. Penguins had taught Ralphabet how to walk and how to sharpen a pencil. People were always saying to him, �Ha! You sharpen a pencil like a penguin.� His so-called friends wanted to know if he slept standing up, like penguins, and they started to bet on this. There was a lot of money riding on it, so people were always trying to break into his house at night without waking him. Ralphabet�s life became terrifying by night, but it was fine by day. Night and day became two very different worlds for him, so his signature was always either �Daylight� or �Starlight� because he thought this was a much more accurate indicator of his identity than his name. He felt like a different person by day and by night, but the word �Ralphabet� could never capture this. So he signed Hope�s cast and her foot with the word �Daylight�. He very rarely got to use the name �Starlight� because he was normally locked in his house after dark.

Hope started working in her aunt�s garden, and after a few days she noticed that if she stood in one place for a long time, the flowers around her would change colour. They never changed colour for other people, and her aunt suggested that the flowers were falling in love with Hope. She noticed that she could change the colours in different ways by wearing a different perfume, or different colour dresses.

The word �Daylight� on her foot started to fade a few days after Ralphabet wrote it, but when she looked at it one evening, after working in the garden all day, she noticed that it was brighter than ever, and it was a slightly different colour too. Over the following weeks, she noticed that the colour of the word changed throughout the day, so she could tell the time from the colour. And she found that she could alter the colour of the flowers in different ways by standing amongst them at different times of the day. She assumed that this was because of the varying colour of the word �Daylight� on her foot.

The woman who lived next door, Mrs. �I�m a dove� Congratulations, often used to come over for a chat. She talked for ages, and Hope always found her very boring. She bored the flowers too � they gradually turned grey as she talked. One afternoon she talked to Hope for what seemed like hours. When she finally left, Hope looked down at her foot to see what time it was and she noticed that the flowers had changed the word �Daylight� to �Starlight� � this was their little joke. Hope said to them, �Oh, you little scamps.� The flowers loved it when she called them �little scamps�. The colour returned to them almost straight away. After this, every time Mrs. Congratulations came over, the flowers would change the word on her foot to �Starlight�.

People often used to watch Hope working in the garden. They�d sit on deck chairs and watch her as she stood in one place for hours. They were really more interested in looking at Hope rather than seeing the flowers change colour, because the change in colour was a very gradual process. But one day, as she walked through the garden, the flowers around her changed to a deep blue very suddenly. One of her friends saw this, and the only conclusion that he could come to was that she wasn�t wearing any underwear. He had noticed before that the lighter the dress she wore, the quicker the flowers would change colour. She was wearing a light summer dress on that day, and the flowers could see up that dress.

Hope often used to meet her friends in the evening in a beer garden behind a pub. When she arrived that evening they all knew about the flowers turning blue so suddenly. The first thing they noticed as she walked towards them was the word �Starlight� in deep blue letters on her foot. They had never noticed that word on her foot before � it was never as noticeable as it was on that evening. They made a connection between the flowers� reaction earlier and the word �Starlight� on her foot � they thought that when this word was on her foot it meant that she wasn�t wearing underwear � but it was really the colour of the word �Starlight� that they should have been looking out for.

Ralphabet was shocked when he saw that word on her foot. He hadn�t signed her foot in weeks, and he couldn�t remember signing her foot with the name �Starlight�. He�d be safely locked inside his house after dark, sound asleep. The thought occurred to him that maybe he signed her foot when he was asleep. He might have been sleepwalking. This was a crushing realisation for Ralphabet � not only would he sleep standing up, but walking as well.

On every evening after that, they looked at her foot as soon as they saw her. The word �Daylight� was written in deep blue letters once, but they had to wait another week before they saw the word �Starlight� again. It wasn�t in blue this time, but they still assumed that this meant she wasn�t wearing underwear. It was really just a sign that she�d been talking to Mrs. Congratulations that day.

Ralphabet, of course, assumed it meant something else. He looked at her foot as she entered the beer garden. He put his head in his hands and said, �Oh no! Not again.� The others asked him what he meant by that and he said he must have met Hope last night, but he can�t remember it. He reacted like this every time he saw the word �Starlight� on her foot, and the others made a connection between Ralphabet�s reaction and Hope�s lack of underwear. They assumed that Ralphabet was getting drunk, meeting Hope, and that he was responsible for the lack of underwear. They developed a whole new respect for him. He even admitted that he slept standing up, and walking as well, but no one made fun of him.

Her friends in the beer garden used to get a thrill out of seeing the word �Starlight� on her foot � her male friends did anyway, all of them except Ralphabet. They�d pay to see that word on her foot. They were always buying her sandals to stop her wearing shoes. She eventually figured out what was going on after talking to Ralphabet, so she decided to confuse them a little. She�d meet Ralphabet before going into the beer garden every evening, and she�d get him to write things on her foot. The word �Bippy� appeared a lot, things like �you bet your sweet Bippy Bippy Bippy�. It did confuse the men in the pub, and it confused the flowers for a while too, when Hope walked amongst them the next day, but after a few weeks they adapted to all of these new words, and it opened up a whole new range of colours in the flowers.

Both Ralphabet and Hope really enjoyed the experience. He always made her laugh in the things he wrote, and she made his day when he got to write around a deep blue �Daylight� or �Starlight�. She started to notice that some of the flowers would suddenly turn purple when she had Ralphabet�s words on her foot, and she loved purple. She suspected that they were trying to tell her something.

Hope and Ralphabet have been married for over a year now, and nowadays she only removes her underwear if her art requires it.

I spent a day with Hope as she worked on the garden of Mrs. Ashida Shoe. It was fascinating to watch a work of art gradually emerge, to see her vision slowly coming into being. Hope recently completed work on the garden at the museum. My good friend and colleague, Begonia Gold, brilliantly described the �chromatic splendour� of this work. Personally, I saw achromatic elements in it, but naturally I bow to Ms. Gold�s towering intellect. We had an illuminating discussion on that particular work. I learn more from those discussions with Begonia than from anything else in life. In Hope�s latest work I can sense those chromatic elements coming through again, but I�m eagerly looking forward to hearing Ms. Gold�s assessment. The artist herself said, �I never consciously set out to put chromatic or� or the other one � I don�t set out to put those elements in my work. I just stand there and let it flow. People will see whatever they want to see in it and I welcome that.�

We all welcome that. To show the town�s appreciation for Hope�s achievements, the Mayor has put forward a proposal for her to do a piece in his own garden. He says he�d like to see the whole garden deep blue to match the town colours, red and white.
-Unsterbell de Lucy.

Mizzenwood�s leading interior designer, Iris Ot, has recently been honoured with an award in recognition of her visionary genius. I met Iris with her husband in their 19^th century house on Anyone Fingle Street. Iris and Noddy Ot have lived there since their marriage, but the house has been in the Ot family for generations. I think it�s safe to say that this old house has never looked as modern as it has since Iris started work on it.

She told me the story of how her career in interior design started with baking. She used to spend hours every day baking, and she gave names to all of her cakes. She called them after herself and after the day she baked them. So if she baked a cake on a Tuesday she�d call it �Iris Tuesday Cake�. If she baked more than one cake on a particular day, she added in a middle name. This depended on the mood she was in � it could be sky or sea or rainbow or rain � e.g. �Iris Sky Tuesday�.

But one day she felt a bit strange and she called a cake �Iris Waltz Thursday�. She had no idea where this name came from, and no one else had any idea either. She felt confused when she was baking on the next day, and she felt even more confused after she called the first cake �Ursulellica Rain Friday�. She looked at it and all she could say was, �But my name is Iris, isn�t it?�

The next cake was called �Cake Hello Friday�. She was almost in a state of panic at this stage. It was her husband, Noddy, who convinced her to take a break from baking for a few weeks or months, but she needed some other outlet for her artistic soul. She started writing a column for this very paper, but words were so inhibiting for Iris. She had always found colours more expressive than words, and it seemed such a waste of her talent and insight to be confined to words, so she came up with a brilliant device to combine words and colours. She�d just write the colours. For example, in an article entitled �Black� she wrote: Black black� black black black� red black� black.

I was just one of her many admirers, but tragically, unbeknownst to Iris, not everyone had the intelligence and broadness of mind to be able to appreciate her work. The then editor of The Mizzenwood Times started a competition in another section of the paper. It was called �Guess what Iris has been doing this week�. People were asked to read her article and from that to guess how she had spent her week. It was much more popular than �Spot the ball�. When Iris realised what was going on she resigned immediately, tragically ending a writing career that was just beginning to bloom. I felt as if another kindred spirit had been taken away from me, and there were so few left in this cruel world, a world that consistently fails to understand beauty and the pain people like Iris and myself feel every day. We�d all write to express our feelings in colours if we could, but the commercial demands of the modern world have no place for souls such as ours. And how else can I express the pain I feel every time I see the flowers in my conservatory wilt in the sun? Last week I realised that I don�t trust anyone but myself, and sometimes I don�t even trust myself. I felt so alone. It seemed as if the whole world was about to end, and I knew that so many of my readers would want to know every detail of the pain I felt, but again the demands of the commercial world prevented that story from ever being told in this paper, let alone on the front page. If there�s a bomb in a small country at the other side of the world, that makes the front page, but when the emotional world is about to end, that�s not commercial enough to be even told. Emotions have no place in our age, and emotional people are either behind or ahead of their time. I feel like a lone candle in the wind. And you can�t talk to people these days. If you meet them on the street they always have to be somewhere else when you try to express your pain. People always have to be somewhere else in the modern world. We no longer have time for truth and beauty.

After the end of her column in The Mizzenwood Times, Iris shut herself off from the cruel world that proved incapable of understanding her radiant soul. She felt it was too soon to return to baking, so she spent her days reading in her drawing room. After a few weeks she began to notice that the room around her seemed happy or sad, depending on the book she was reading. At first she thought that she was projecting her own emotions onto the room, but other people noticed it too. The only way she could account for this was that the room was reading the book as well. Iris didn�t like the idea of the room reading the book over her shoulder, so she put a coat over her head and read with a flash lamp. After a while she noticed that the coat seemed happy or sad depending on the book she was reading, so the coat must have been reading it as well, but she liked the coat much more than the room, so she didn�t mind that as much.

After a few weeks of reading under the coat, she heard some strange sounds coming from the room around her. She�d look out from under the coat, but she�d never see anything unusual. She started to get the impression that the drawing room was practising its putting while she was under the coat. The room denied it, but one day she removed her coat very suddenly and she saw a golf ball roll across the carpet.

Iris felt that this was another example of the modern world conspiring against her, and she wasn�t prepared to be defeated by this. When people came to visit her, she always invited them into the drawing room, and she took every opportunity to badmouth the room around them. She criticised the carpets, the walls, the curtains � everything. The room seemed quite happy with its appearance, and there was no sign of its confidence draining away after all this criticism. So Iris decided it was time to redecorate her drawing room. She decorated it in a way that would really annoy the room. She had become acquainted with the room�s personality from its taste in books � it was very similar to her own personality. She decorated the room in a way that went completely against this personality, but she got an enormous amount of satisfaction from it because she knew she was getting revenge on the room. She hated green and orange, but she made these the dominant colours in the room. This was the start of her career as an interior decorator. Her method has never changed � she always tries to determine the personality of a room and then to decorate it in a way that goes completely against this personality. She�s been hailed as a visionary. Invariably, the inhabitants of the house say they would never have dreamt of Iris�s alterations. She�s proved to be particularly popular with those who are always in conflict with the modern world, people who often feel defeated by that world. Iris�s designs give those people the feeling that they�re getting one over on something. It produces an enormous sense of empowerment.

I watched Iris at work on her latest project. She was asked to completely redesign a whole house, and when I joined her she was working on the living room. All of the furniture was taken away. She removed the carpet and stripped all of the wallpaper. I felt she was making a profound statement about the nature of the modern world. The owners of the house, Jim and Snua Whirl, agreed that it was profound. Mrs. Whirl said, �The living room won�t like that at all. It looks so uncomfortable. It�s just what we wanted.�

It�s heartening to hear stories of people like the Whirls finding their own little place in this cruel world. The visionary genius of Iris Ot is providing a beacon of hope for countless kindred spirits. I always look up to the authority of my good friend Unsterbell de Lucy on these issues. She recently said, �Iris may be removing the physical light bulbs, but she�s turning on a spiritual light switch.� I think Ms. de Lucy was nearly right in that statement. Far be it from me to question the authority of Unsterbell, but my own little opinion, for what it�s worth, would be that it�s an emotional as well as a spiritual light switch. It�s a light switch that illuminates issues such as trust and our place in the modern world. I greatly look forward to my next meeting with Ms. de Lucy. I�m sure we�ll have a long and illuminating discussion on the subject. Unsterbell understands the plight faced by souls such as ours. She understands how something as small as a rumour can be so powerful. I have stood facing the full power of a gale recently. People have said that I got into an argument with my own face because it refused to look like Liz Hurley, and that my face started making faces at other people while I was talking, but I still refused to apologise to it. I�d like to take this opportunity to deny this rumour. I did not get plastic surgery as revenge on my face. I�ve never been concerned with outward appearances. People like myself and Iris recognise the true value of inner beauty, and the true nature of our fight to defend it.
-Begonia Gold.