Mr.Blobz

The plight of the urban elephant, the soul-rememberer. This giant was felled by development adjacent to the old Bromwell Hotel in Salt River, now home to a ’boutique mall’ and a deli with an atrocious baguette, puffy and pale.

The pachyderm – unnamed – caught the pity of Mr. Blobz almost a year ago, as she lay, felled beyond the weedy grass that had overtaken this site, a squalid compaction of old plastic and oil fronting a rotten corrugation of assorted materials.  Now, scaffolding ensnares the fading corpse. When Mr Blobz paid a belated visit the puffy Congolesienne security man wanted to call the avarocious owner – No Photo! – even of a dead elephant.

Mr Blobz senses they know what they’re building on. An elephant graveyard.

Adrift, floating down the road in a Vanden Plas stationwagon….Mr Blobz is enchanted by the idea of a life on water, mesmerised by the ripples in the stream, those delicate shapes we create in our own wake, the patterns of our own waking… Streams of life and consciousness, held together in a wooden canoe. Floating, suspended.

My dear neighbour owns the boat and the car and the beautiful building behind (another story – this is where the Lower Main Road Xmas Party takes place every year.) In a secret workshop behind the wall, a smaller wooden canoe is being constructed by loving hands, for a son. Strips of rare wood bent to shape, brass screws holding wooden kisses together. Placing life in the stream. And, like the parent that he is, watching life grow up and inevitably away, around a bend in the river.