— brilliant, and so right 🙂

Jane

Mannequin as analogy, and as a thank-you, on the 364th day of the 5th year 🙂

GA, another Eden ‘entered into’, this your birthday Eve 🙂

And yes, trust ‘our man’ to find the most interesting, individual and intelligent-looking “dummies”!

He has learnt, so he tells us, to “trust in the knowledge that, although I rarely have any stories planned beyond a few days ahead, material will always appear” (Because with pen as wand you make it so – it really doesn’t just happen, upon a page, and us then happen upon it!) In our 100,000’s we know too to trust that knowledge and trust this man, with 5 minutes of our day, every day, often more than, and more often 🙂

GA, thank you – with 5 candles on, and much ‘icing on the cake’ which each year is bigger, richer, more filled with nuttiness and cream …thankfully, with so many more people now bought to the table 🙂 Although there’s also that wonderful feeling, that the stirring of words and kneading of thoughts would be no different, made to be no less delicious, even if there was only one.

With such skill, commitment and generosity, you bring all you meet in interview to life (even the stubbornly inanimate, not least due to every fibre of their body being glass and plasticised!) All this in order to bring Life to all of us 🙂

Back in London E17 – where William Morris once was and stole a march – 100 years on, the ‘bodies on parade’ are no longer hitting the high ground of the battlefields but the battle-ground of the high street, the business of the day that was once the shipping out infantry-men now shipping the stilled bodies of global retail – ensuring that this GA tale of 25 August 2014, of a place and its people [as always 🙂 ] is for me, the best kind of homage to the broken bodies of the First World War. Keep Carnate and Carry On …or for those more local, Keep Calm and Cash-and-Carry On – but most importantly, keep crafting, keep creating… from ‘boots on the ground’ to shoes for sale, fitted-out feet to fibre-glass flesh.

And so Happy re-Birthday GA, for when you and all of us wake up with tomorrow’s slice of Life. From Nicholas Hawksmoor to Nicholls and Clarke Hardware, you’ve dressed what were at best mere mannequins in our minds or indeed empty shop windows waiting for the business within to be taken over!

Today’s photo’s from Patricia N honouring an author – as much as his subject – who has ‘more bodies on the ground’ than ever 🙂 An amazing achievement, from one London E1 desk, but in fact from One with such style, literary and visual.

Enough – you have writing to do! Another 8,174 days and stories. Aren’t we lucky 🙂

I must look up papier-mache. That material must be a lot stronger than the “school classroom” version if it is still used for these figures.