Bullshitter's Bio (Part1, Vol 1)

When I was younger I had a certain fondness for playing with words, sometimes vocally but most often in my head. I liked to change the names given to most things; a garage became Derek and on the more formal occasions in my head, Derek the Garage; there was Rob the Bank and Alexander the Gate all making it to print in the blossoming new dictionary on the shelves in my mind. It was a constant work in progress though as names morphed into new names. Eventually names gave way to numbers- Rob the bank briefly became 801 and then in a partial u-turn became Robby 801. Derek transformed into Des 47. Then in the windy waves of warm spring air in a stick-in-hand walk through a birch wood a new naming system, which excited me greatly, entered my fertile head. All names were to be replaced with adjectives that described the quality I assigned to the objects themselves. Hence Derek the Garage took on the appellation of Oily or The Oily One; the sky became Bluey; a tarmac road became Treacle Lane  and a peach became Fur Ball. This still left room for some charming anomalies, to wit an old abandoned truck in the ditch along the main road became Count Truckula and a ticket became Tickety-Boo.

Eventually, the new dictionary became so ingrained in my head that utterances slipped out in normal conversation. This threw people a little askew. My parents worried about me and then worried some more and eventually sent me to a special clinic for such problems.

There I met a man who put 'S' at the end of every word, a young girl who put ‘Sh’ at the beginning of every other word. The problem was that we all hung out together and picked up each other's unique wording. It didn't so much replace our own , rather it fused with it to create alarmingly non-sensical utterances, for instance a garage which had evolved through the ephemeral nicknames of Derek The Garage and Oily or the Oily one became Shoilys, as in ‘ I’ve put my bike in Shoilys’ except all the other words in that sentence were probably corrupted in other ways.

The clinic’s experts fashioned some bespoke exercises to counter this but these added even more corruption to our spoken words so in the end they concluded that rather than speaking such gibberish we had better say nothing at all. This annoyed me to such an extent that at the tender age of 12 I vowed not only to refrain from speaking then but forevermore!( much to my parents sadness). However, in the next few years my resulting choice of career was pleasing to my parents; it would allow me to express myself and entertain others- on my 16th birthday they bought me a tight black jump-suit and a pair of fine white gloves to enable me to hit the streets of London as a mime act.

The next week I stalked the embankment to practice with my new gloves. I chose a good patch on the grass by the Tate Modern where I could debut my Man-Pushing-A- Large-Ball-Up-A- Hill-And-Getting-Flattened-As-It-Rolls-Back-Down. I was tentative at first, thrusting my white-gloved in front of my then suddenly losing my nerve and then pretending I was just stretching into a yawn. But somehow the courage came and I started rolling my ball. It went well enough and as my confidence grew that afternoon I showcased all my gestures to an indifferent crowd of one old couple, a Japanese teenage girl and two skinny pigeons. As I became more accomplished I would walk into restaurants and practice hand flourishes to beckon diners to their seats; I’d elaborately refuse freely given flyers by people in the street by holding up both hands in the halt position and moonwalk away from them with hyperbolic rejection.

One day a restaurant owner actually chased me, not just for a few yards but all along the South Bank,  and over London bridge; I jumped onto a passing ferry but he still kept coming, so I dived in the Thames and swam for my life. Once I came ashore at Blackfriars he was still hot on my trail. In the end I mimed my drama to a policeman who then apprehended the fucking nutter.

For the most part though people were charmed by my clumsy enthusiasm and apparent lack of talent, in perhaps the same way they would warm to Eddie The Eagle Edwards or a poodle on a skateboard.

I’d like to say that fame beckoned quickly but the only beckoning going on was my elaborate ‘pulling-in’ of traffic onto no-access roads( for which I received a catalogue of hand gestures, which I would then mimic as if I thought their exponents were practising mime like me.). And with time I refined the Man-Pushing-A- Large-Ball-Up-A- Hill-And-Getting-Flattened-As-It-Rolls-Back-Down by making it more real, so real in fact that I used an actual giant boulder and it really did flatten me.

There was a new ward in St Jospeh’s Hospital that catered especially for ‘cartoon accidents’. There were patients with bulging eyes, electric-shock hair, large pulsating head lumps, even one or two who had received such a forceful downward blow to the head that they were just a head on a pair of feet. I was the only patient who had been entirely flattened. Getting to the hospital had been an outrageous indignity, involving the paramedic rolling me up like a Morrocan Rug, if you please!

Nurse Wanda was young but she knew her mind and furthermore she seemed to know other people’s minds, especially mine. So when I garnered a suave approach to her affections, well the suavest a man can muster in that condition, by shuffling my body up the bedside cabinet so that it would faintly make contact with her hips as she bent over to plump up my pillows, she pulled away laughing. ‘That’s enough of that Flat-so,’ She said rolling her eyes with some barely perceptibly sauciness.

During my recovery she breezed in every day to straighten my blankets and pump my pillows and usually managed to makes some joke about my condition- ‘Are you feeling a little flat, today?’ ‘Good morning, 2D’ ‘Don’t worry you’ll soon be returning to your flat soon’ -all punctuated with warm yelps of laughter.

Once I’d blown up to my former proportions I started dating Wanda. We would meet at the Embankment tube station and walk arm and arm along the river. It occurred to me to break my silence and become a speaking member of humanity again. Love can do that. Love can break your silence. But my miming had become such a part of my soul’s expression that it seemed the most authentic me. So we strolled along laughing together at my most elaborate mimes of love, sketching in the air giant hearts or plucking our hearts from our chest and squishing them together.

She had a keen sense of mischief did old Wanda, which manifested in the most delightful spontaneity; one day she pulled us both into a joke shop and bought several sets of goofy dentures, the type that British comedian Dick Emery used to wear when he played his menacingly camp vicar. We wore them ourselves and entered shops as a goofy couple just to see any subtle responses from shop assistants. Then we insisted that our friends wore them while we compiled a photo album of every one we knew in their most goofy form. We persuaded strangers on the street to pose for our photos, waiters, policemen, taxi drivers, anyone we came across. Wanda found a friend in publishing and before that year was out we had published the first volume of Goof- an album of our pictures with captions and descriptions of who we had encountered these people. Soon ‘goofing’ became an internet craze in the spirit of its predecessors like planking and milking etc.

………………………………………… 

A Trick Of The Light

I walk across the quiet market town in early blue-skied January. It's dry and pleasant and I wonder why it engages me so much. I reason it may be the light, the way it hits the silver hair of passerbys, the way it turns the decorative white shop fascade and the silver lamp posts golden, the way it syrups the puddles. And I notice as so often I do,  that the light once it hits its target hints towards an otherness, another version of the same thing, as if it is nudging me into a parallel life where everything is slightly agleam. And suddenly a cloud blinks the sun and we are all shifted to yet another version of things- less bright and hopeful, more stark and tedious.

The Unshared

I would have you here to see the things I can see, to smell the things I can smell and I am wondering how I can translate this sensual experience into a code that you would understand. It starts, I suppose with the apparent facts of this scene. I am jogging along a hilly part of town by the old hospital; there are cedar trees to my left which mark the entrance to the hospital and more trees in the distance which form part of the common attached to the hospital; the soil, I think, is sandy as it often is where pine trees grow. To the right are the front gardens of quiet little bungalows; on the road soggy leaves and berries and bird mess, the sky is typical East Anglian for the time of year- grey and heavy with the threat of a rain that may never happen; the trees are and shrubs around are bare and black. However this does not describe my true experience of all these things. They are there and I am here and what I am experiencing is a pure resonance of them or rather an orchestra of resonances that create the feeling of hometown-ness, of a vicarious cosiness gained from peering through windows at softly lit rooms, of a childhood of several impressionable hours spent in wet woods with curvy winding walls and dank lakes, of timeless yew trees and pigeons feeding on bright red berries, a sense of farmhouses, rusty plough shears and thick fog rolling on top of fields of sugarbeet and I would have you know all this of me. I would have you hear the sounds of all those features arranged as they are as a lyrical intensity in my soul and yet we both know that words will not transport experience. Instead you will have to picture the features and make of them what you will. And I will jog here again tomorrow with those same features but perhaps tomorrow the tiniest change in light will unravel yet more of me to know.

Rainbow Town

Frizzy waves of heat rise from the new tarmac and fuse into the light, forming that unreal brightness of summer. A spicy fragrance wafts from a hole in the brick work. I peer in but see only blackness, but vibrations emanate from inside. I put my ear to the hole, some of the mortar sawdust collects around my beard. I probably look as if I have been breakfasting on old houses. Then the foggy sound of three trumpets blows out into black emptiness. In the cool of a damp cellar a joyful trio of ingenues have gathered to make musically hay while the sun of youth shines.At least that is my preferred version of things.

The blue sky above is really yellow, I think it's blue, I know its blue and yet its yellow. That sometimes happens in summer; you assume the sky is blue but usually it is white. Across the street chrome mud guard from a bicycle blazes silver into my blinking eyes. The metal is so brilliant, so tense and poised that it lightly creaks like a little scurrying mouse. The spokes of the wheel have strands of straw in them so as the bike is pedalled, by a man dressed entirely in blue linen, the flicking sound of the straw tickling the spokes forms a harmony with the mouse.  Up above the streets I see the church steeple  in cubist squints and that completes the harvest of my attention on my walk up this small town on this hot, hot day. 

I would happily continue to wander inside my thoughts allowing my physical trundle to take care of itself. Besides for some painful moments I had the vision that I was on a travel documentary where we see the presenter looking around his subject place with affected innocent interest. For moments, just moments, I was one such presenter, which galled me enough to retreat into an inner world of far-off thoughts. However, the pattern of the day is weaved thus:  tracts of light beige ease suddenly interrupted by thick vermillion cords; all is well and normal and suddenly along comes a startling interlude which throws doubt on the entire previously imagined normality. One such bold thread happened on the train here, when on the screeching stalling into the station the train suddenly disappeared and we all fell to the platform.

One pedestrian dressed in the same blue as the man on the bike walks out of a shop. He sniffs his newspaper, wrinkles his nose, sniffs again, hoists his head back, sniffs again and then pops the newspaper in the bin and strides off looking very pleased with himself. Then a large woman steps out of a hotel  gasping for breath, fanning her face with a sky blue fan. She too is dressed in blue linen (but more of a sky blue) in the form of a twin-set, even her hair has been dyed blue and her nail gloss is a match.

The next building attached to a congregational church, I peer in the window and see that everyone is dressed in blue, more or less the same zaffre blue but with some brandeis and bleu de france variations. I walk on distracting myself with thoughts about chopping boards- I recently saw a very thick wooden chopping board and wondered if the makers made them thicker. It caused me to imagine a chopping board so thick that it came with a built-on ladder. These are pleasant thoughts. I am at one with tanned graininess as I sweat along this high street going precisely nowhere, with no purpose in mind either.

Speck of rain appear on the pinkish grey road. ‘So it is true’ I say to myself as if the appearance of rain verified some mystical truth or scientific theory. It didn’t but how I must have fun with the imaginary audience. I take cover, then suddenly the loud, loud booming of the church bells shake the walls of the buildings around me. The streets are pouring with people all bustling and running to the playing field, I jog along, amazed at this swarm of coloured people; for everybody is dressed , from head-to-toe, in either red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet. They all running with such purpose it’s like the church bells are a hypnotic trigger. 

We make it to a playing field next to a school and each colour lines up to form a massive band, then the bands press together and once the final person arrives the borders of the bands wash away and one multi-coloured band is formed, I see now that the faces and limbs have disappeared, there is only colour, then the band floats up, expands and expands, and then arches across the valley and a thus a giant rainbow is formed.

The End Of People (True Story)

What inspired me to interview Suzy was the following extract in an anarchic magazine:

Suzy takes it out of the pool queue case, unrolls it with some sense of ceremony and holds it as high as her small frame will allow. While others want the end of wars, to feed the world, a change of government or to extirpate wayward bankers Suzy's message is as refreshing as it is shocking. Her cotton bed sheet banner ,which she carries at some forty marches a year, simply calls for the end of people.

 'No people, no people. What do I want? No people. When do I want it? Now!' she cries while she stomps her artificially-starved frame along the streets of a fed-up London.

October the 1^st, muted chrome clouds above and an earnest wind tumbling paper coffee cups around the finer cobbled streets of Bloomsbury. Suzy skips along the pavement, dressed in baggy orange trousers, baseball pumps and a graffittied t-shirt, her long blonde hair blows not only across her face but anybody else’s who is walking at the same pace. We greet one another with mediterranean air kisses. She picks a two-tabled café and for the sake of readers of ‘Stupid Magazine’ I begin my interview.

‘So according to my records you have a degree in International politics?’

‘Yes, that’s right, for all the good it did me’ She pulls out a harmonica from her rear pocket and starts playing a soft, mournful blues. The waitress grimaces then smiles.

‘And then you worked for a shipping company as an account manager?’ I say raising my voice over her tune.

‘Don’t remind me’ she says with the harmonica in her mouth so her answer is vaguely and comically tuneful. The she laughs and laughs almost drunkenly. I decide to hurry up to the main point.

'So Suzy when you say you want an end to people do you mean a certain type of heartless greed-driven ignoramus?'

'No' she says putting away her harmonica and lovingly arranging her luscious hair. 'I want all people ended, finished, done, completed, terminated, you see?

'Yes, I do. It's just that it would sort of include me.....and  I've become rather attached to my existence and anyway, it would also include you' I gulp on hot sour tea and watch her squint as a shock of surprising sun hits the window and a slight rustle of the London plane trees that line the square wafts in the top window.

'Oh, and what is wrong with that? What right do we have to existence?' Her face tightens to almost pure bone and her eyes fix and pale.

'But you can't deny someone the right to exist and anyway it's impossible.'

'Why impossible?'

‘There is no state you can have where you are deprived of existence.'

'What about death?'

'You might experience dying but you cannot experience death'

'Well, anyway all people must go because they are wrong’

'Wrong? What do you mean wrong?'

'Look you know what I’m talking about…people are just wrong.'

'Well, not really. You want people to somehow experience non-existence' I  say smarmily, returning to the thrust of my argument 'you see how crazy that is?'

'No, Why should it be?'

'Because there is no such thing as non-existence, don't you see?'

'You're making no sense. What do you mean, Mr. Philosopher?' She scratched on the section of firm thigh she had exposed through a rip in her skin-tight faded jeans. Her skin was Scandinavian flawless.

'Put it this way..it is impossible to imagine non-existence. You can imagine nothing but even nothing is the very barest form of something. Non-existence cannot be imagined and it cannot be known and yet you want people to somehow experience it because you don't like them?'

'Yes, that's right and you won't talk me out of it and by the way, I didn’t say that I didn’t like people'

'Then why in God’s name are you doing this?'

'Who knows? It rose in me. Anyway, you are supposed to be into this sort of thing. You are supposed to be alternative'

I was up for absurdity but it and my readers demanded at least a strand of rationale and since I am not interested in self-indulgence or psychotic motivations I decide to terminate the interview. She is clearly a childish fool albeit a beautiful one.

I spent the following week chasing up stories about virgin rabbits, real paper aeroplanes and a man who coughs through his ears and when I wasn’t doing that I was walking in the park with my siamese cat, sketching silouhettes of bare trees. Every now and then I would find myself thinking about Suzy and her antics and such is the case when you keep replaying and replaying some idea it seemed to embed itself into my model of reality. By the end of the week I was aching to  her interview her again.

The following Tuesday I tracked her down in a large empty house in Lee, South London.

She opened the door before I knocked.

‘You took your time’ she said smiling. She then grabbed hold of my black wooly jumper and shoved me against the wall, and there and then on that cold wooden floor, under the soft blare of hallway candles, we became lovers.

Over the next few days we recruited several more supporters to our cause and since nobody had a house big enough to contain us all we all moved to a warehouse in Fish Island. Everybody cooked and cleaned and danced and made music .Suzy would recite poetry on the spot while I quietly kept rythm with her on an old banjo. There was a lot of love in a spontaneous group and after a month of cohabiting Mick the butcher from Southend stole a bus; we painted it up in psychedelic colours and toured around the east coast, swimming in the cold sea, preaching in the streets and parks and making bonfires for barbecues.

Soon the group got so big that we needed more land so we moved onto a deserted farm in Hampshire. It was a beautiful spot- crumbling building, wild flowers , willow trees by a stream. Pete, the carpenter from Southampton organised little workcamps so that we could cobble together more living areas in the barns and outsheds. People kept coming and coming, pitching their tents in friendly circles; some even  built dens from tree branches. Suzy kept an eye on numbers and controlled the marches but in no less than two months we had over a million people in Britain calling for the end of people.

There was so much energy and love in our community and as the movement spread across Britain communities were transformed from anonymous and broken to thriving and caring. By the end of the year our message had reached mainland Europe and in a few weeks it swept right across to Russia, then China, Japan, Australia, and eventually to America. By year two our cause was established as the new world religion and one whole planet was finally united in its attempts to rid the world of people.

Realising the stupendous paradox we had created as a planet - that we were all loving one another because we were united in wanting to eliminate our species we ( and I do mean the entire population of the planet) sat in a calm void for three days and on day four we all spontaneously took up gardening. We turned the entire land mass of planet Earth into a flower bed and when the blooms came through Earth became one big ball of brilliant oranges, yellows and reds. The colours were so vivid, so overpowering and the fragrance so strong that we stopped eating and drinking as we were able to sustain ourselves on its energy alone. Suzy and I then sprouted wings and spent the next three hundred years just fluttering about the skies.

When I Was Pigeon

When I was a pigeon I used to come into roost at aabout 3:30pm. I know it was 3:30pm because there are plenty of clocks in the sky, invisible, of course, to the human eye but as plain as day to bird life. Most of them are made by Seiko. Rolex used to have the contract but Seiko undercut them in the clock price wars of 1835. I am lying, of course....or am I? So where was I? Yes, I would come into roost mid afternoon after a casual day in the grain barns. Ash was my favourite tree. The tips are quite thin allowing for a more exciting sway in the breeze, and I also don't mind a thick yew tree around a graveyard where it's all dark and sinister, particularly in a cloudy twilight. Anyway, into roost I would come. The first task was to get comfortable and make sure no dangers lay around me, like a hapless teenager with an air-rifle or a cat in the tree, or even a ferret; for once a ferret made its way into a rabbit warren and unbeknown to me or him or anyone else the warren extended up through the tree trunk, a vast labyrinth of the elite of the rabbit world lay secretly within-Hell there were rabbits living in that tree!  Imagine the fright I had seeing a rabbit scuttling past me with a golden bloody-mouthed ferret hot on his tail. Anyway, I digress, again and again. Pigeons, they say in the bird world, digress, which is hardly the greatest crime. I mean, lapwings actually beat their children with looted workshop tools-spanners, screwdrivers and the like and Canada geese kidnap humans and experiment on them, so digression pales into harmless fun by comparison. So, anyway, I would get myself comfortable in the tree and then select a book from the shelf. Oh yes, sorry, again  invisible to the human eye, most trees have a book shelf about two-thirds up the trunk. Nobody knows who puts them there but let me tell you they stock some ripping good yarns. One book was entirely devoted to the life of a bank clerk who thought he used to be a pigeon and another was about a pigeon who thought he was a bank clerk. I even wrote one myself once- about a man who wrote an account of a man who thought he used to be a pigeon and then discovered when he got to the last line that he actually was a pigeon thinking that he used to be a man!!

Shane's Weird Day

As I shovelled away and she clung tightly to the branches I tried to remember my life as a translator. It was in a small town. I remember a willow tree and a carnival, then again was it in a grim quarter of European city? I remember a meeting with a landlord or was it an author? We sat in a pub. I remember the building- the window frames were berry-red and the room perfumes with the vague smell of saddles and oils, wet clumps of carborundum waste dotted a concrete floor, a river of petrol run a liberal course along one flagstone. My eyes zoomed in on the multi-coloured film on the top which displayed yellows and purples and greens and a turquoise. But wait this was in a factory in a different life, a different me, I think. Yet the yellow pulled me in. It snaked around and gathered momentum, then apparently rose up from out of the river. In the wet wheaty air of this mill or chicken factory or warehouse it rose higher and spread out in an exact form of a top-hatted man in 1940’s dapper attire. He announces himself as Mr Yellow. He grabs a cherry-red cane from out of the petrol slick and slides around like Fred Astaire, and in these squalid surrounds it’s all about elegance, one mustn’t surrender to the indignity of this wretched place, don’t you know. While Mr. Yellow taps around the pelleting machines I recall in a parade of still frames the origin of the building. A team of fun-loving kiwis erected it in such a breezy manner;   every day they turned up in that green minibus, hungover and wise-cracking. Young Shane had sights on a  life outside, putting up buildings with a rum old crew, oh the laughs, the comraderie. So  feeling all repleat with ambition, he  knocked in those rafters with… yes… some type of love, that easy  baseball cap sort of love. And on that dusty week the radio was crackling away with the repetitive news that there was a huge ash cloud spreading over the skies from a volcano in Iceland, so no flights, broken holiday dreams of stranded travellers . Shane whistled and banged and chipped and carved and laughed. This is it he thought with big wet eyes- there never was a big life awaiting him in New Zealand, Why doesn’t God, just roll his head down from the skies and say “Listen Buddy you’re wasting your time with this path. It will lead to a big fat nothing”  Instead what wasted hope, wasted conversations, wasted thoughts. Oh well, what’s done is done, gonna get a girl, rent a bungalow, maybe start a fencing business as well. He sang loudly and yawned even louder with long stretching arms, the skinny face nearly cracked wide open from the power of the yawn and he kept doing it, maybe every 5 minutes. Thing was nobody really noticed and what an irritation if they had have done, then Shane would be mainly his yawn. He wore a shiny silver watch which looked well out of place with brown weathered arms and what’s more he never ever looked at his watch. He always asked somebody else the time. And sometimes he would be talking to somebody and then his eyes would bulge in absolute terror, looking to the sky behind the other person, then shout: “Run, run, the ash cloud, the ash cloud! His victim would spin around fast, then Shane would yelp in laughter.
One day when he was het up with a heat rash while fencing on flat studland near Newmarket little red bubbles formed across his chest and forearms, like he was turning into another creature. The job was to add a new line of fence to a very old but stable one. With his baseball cap tight across his pin-head he set to work laying down posts and rails on the hard, dusty land, intermittently scratching himself. The sky greyed over and a thick cloud floated past him in the opposite direction to all the other clouds and he said to himself whatthehell, It must be, he said aloud in a dry winey voice, a clouded spaceship used by the elemental spirits of the earth ha ha ha, like it said in some comic. What the hell! He chuckled to himself like he always did when he was disturbed. It was as if he embraced these disturbances, like it was an excuse to really be as mad as the rabid dog that dragged him out of the pram when he was 3 months-old. He bustled on, coughing and nearly sneezing his loose eye out.
Two boys were throwing their knives at the old cornerpost, screaming with triumph or laughing at near misses and on the rough post top was an old jackdaw apparently captivated by the scene. The post was slightly tilted because a headstrong goat was tethered to it. The animated scene was completed with

'Yessir, that is the busiest post, I've ever seen'

As he got closer the boys fled through the thorny edge throwing their knives at sheep turd.

Close-up  one side of the post had a poorly engraved Tim 4 Sue and beneath  were the jagged scratches of knives and fencing nails.  Each side was a different shade from a continuum of grey to green to brown. He glared  A standard old post, so what? Why did it capture so much of his attention? The jackdaw  fluttered off to another post but stayed watching like a spy  Something felt weird about that post, not a good weird. The goat yanked at its tether eager to nibble on more of the short,bare gras and the post tilted slightly more. Shane glared more intently.

Peering closer and burrowing his vision into one of the splits in the top section he could see somthing move! Not a mouse or a little sparrow or some little creature but actually a blinking human eye! 'Well, isn't the that the fuckiest thing!' Hello, Hello! little eye! Hello!. He knocked on the post but the eye merely blinked and when he poked a nail at it through the split, it seemed to have read his mind and darted marginally away.   Fuck this! He dismissed the event as being an halluciation, perhaps related to the rash. He carried on.

By coffee-time he had scratched himself silly but  five posts had been sledge hammered into the hard ground . He sloped wearily off to the open plan barn to douse his fiery rash with cold tap water. Inside the barn was the expected array of dusty farmalia -tractors, trailers, mowers, fertilizer bags, shovels and a broken broom or two. He splashed water on his chest . Momentarily, utter relief prevailed; the heat of the rash died down and his body tingled with refreshed vigour. But ten seconds later the itching was even worse as if murderous little ants were nibbling their way into his flesh His head scanned the barn. Everything seemed in order, and yet...and yet something was odd. Then he saw something. In one of the breeze blocks, set back in a hole was another blinking eye and  he knew instinctively it was the pair to the other one... fine blue eyes with several marine shades. What the hell is going on! He forgot his scratching which had now drawing blood and swooped his wiry body towards the eye-inhabited breeze block and like a shy kitten the eye was gone.

As the day progressed he saw in the ancient oak by his pick-up truck a roman nose; in the blackthorn hedge he saw a pair of full lips; he saw the dimple-less chin in the water trough and the rest of the face in now-you-see-me-now-you-don't fragments around the farmyard. Bring it on! he shouted to the grey heavens above  while scratching his arms and spinning his baseball cap around.
The eyes and features turned out to be mine. Funny how things pan out, eh?