Paradisehead

(originally posted on myspace here)

From "Adam and Eve" by the late Willie Rushton and the Primitive painters of the Portal Gallery, a beautiful little book picked up in Oxfam in Kentish Town on a Sunday evening set aside to be spent as though the doctor with a talent for tenderness was in town and knocking about beside me (the "she" mentioned below is Mrs. Bradley, Rushton's own imaginary companion, like my doctor or that American who lives inside Jack Dee's head in 'Lead Baloon' - or maybe he's a ghost, or a cylon, I don't know. And the painting is "First Love" by Martin Leman):

"Now she's tut-tutting very loudly.
" 'Mr Leman,' I say, 'is well-known for his cats.' I don't know why I think this will help. 'World famous.'
" 'Tut-tut-tut.'
" 'He loves chess.'
"There is no way I am going to persuade her that these are two cats playing chess."

That made me laugh a lot. I loved this book:

"Tuesday: God brings every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air to Adam 'to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' Here we were very lucky as he was 100% right."

And here's one of a number of bizarrely oblique jokes I recently unearthed that I had sent off to Private Eye back in the nineties. Eh?