Something on the grassy knoll…

But first…
Dulltown, UK: Today’s elephant in the room is the one standing in front of the TV when everyone else is trying to watch the football.
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When I did my one-year foundation course in art at the local college many years ago it was a time when the people who taught on those courses were actual artists, who produced art – unlike the current people, who haven’t bothered learning any skills, other than those of reading about, keeping up to date with the latest trends in, and talking about, art.
One great thing I took away from the course was the importance of looking at stuff, the world around us, everything. We were encouraged to look at colour, form, line, texture, not just in art works, but in everyday life: the colour of the moss on a broken down brick wall, the orange/brown rust on the otherwise brightly coloured tin can, the ripped smiling poster on the hoarding at the end of the street – get the idea? It changed the way we went about in the world, as if we had just opened our eyes for the first time – I suppose it was all a bit Zen really. All great artists have been great observers, Turner, Picasso, Leonardo… well, all of them really, even Kandinsky (my spellcheck wanted that to be clean skin).
So, last Wednesday afternoon I was out and about keeping my eyes open as usual; I was actually sitting on a bus which was waiting at some traffic lights, when I spotted, lying on the raised grass verge by the road, a piece of dirty plywood. It was rectangular in shape about, oh, ten inches long and four inches wide; it had some letters roughly painted on it in white. I was mildly curious as to what the letters said, but unfortunately it was lying upside down from my vantage point and was difficult to make out. It seemed to be just a few letters, perhaps one word; the first letter, upside down of course, seemed to be a ‘Y’ and the last one was possibly an ‘H’…
Hm… what a puzzle. As the lights changed and the bus moved off my brain was busy trying to come up with a word which would fit – the only one I could think of was ‘Yahweh’. But why would anyone write ‘Yahweh’ not very well on a piece of plywood, and then discard it on a grassy knoll?…
I pondered for another moment and then all became clear – of course, it didn’t say ‘Yahweh’ at all, it was a surrogate car number plate someone had made, and tied on with a piece of string, to replace the proper one that had fallen off their vehicle, and of course that one had fallen off too. Good! Problem solved…
However, I did now have the word ‘Yahweh’ floating and bobbing about in my head – (a form of the name of the Hebrew God, a word too sacred to be spoken, nor should it be written on a piece of plywood and left by a busy road – so it is written.) As the bus trundled along the word jolted about and ended up dropping into a handy hole, in a joke, in my brain, and the whole episode ended up being featured in a new blog post. See, that’s the value of keeping your eyes open!

‘What is God’s favourite song?’
‘I don’t know, what is God’s favourite song?’
‘I Did It Yahweh…’
‘Doh!…’

(I D I M W)