In Search of Permanence…

Or…

In Recognition of the Impertinence of Time…

I have a predilection for plastic. The concept of crafting products from man-made matter appeals on a fundamental level. Plus, except for certain aggregates, natures’ endeavours when it comes to raw materials tend toward the fragile. The polymers we manufacture are both ductile and at the same time robust enough to endure. And the colours are more vivid, too.

I delight in modern prosthetics because, to me, they are the embodiment of evolution. Take, for instance, a para-runner’s blades and compare them to a pirates’ wooden leg. The carbon fibre trumps wood in every measurable way. Long John’s peg would never have gotten him into the Olympics.

As a child, I was made to visit my grandad’s tomb; a modest stone edifice with simple engravings, next to my brother’s much gaudier affair. They huddled together in the late afternoon shade of the village church, the greyness contemporising the tombs with the building, pressganging souls to the eternal service of an overbearing god. The scent of pine, the damp chill of the air and the piety of my nan, conspired to make the whole experience thoroughly depressing. As she talked to him, I would wonder how the dead could be in two places at the same time; three if you were to believe nan, who said grandad was also in heaven with my brother. How could grandad be in Sussex under the pines, as well as spread like fertilizer over the barren sands of Iraq, IED’d into non-existence and blown to the hot winds?

Maybe that is why I so love plastics. Bury polythene and come back in a thousand years; it’ll still be there. Plastic doesn’t decompose, like grandad; or the wooden box entombed in the churchyard in his place.

I collect carrier bags. I also hoard the plastic toys from Kinder Eggs, throwing out the sickly-sweet chocolate. I store the ‘toys’- I think of them as object d’art- in some of my more commonplace carriers, with another set of bags, labelled by year, to hold the matt yellow ‘eggs’ the toys came in. It’s interesting to me how the colour has lightened and the plastic thinned over time. Progress. The rarer bags I curate are not meant to hold mere ephemera. They are stored flat, separated by thin but stiff polycarbonate sheets in special drawers I’ve had built from acrylic.

I won’t listen to digital music either. Shellac and vinyl will, if cared for, endure. It’s also tangible; not something leased from the Apple Corporation. Nan also insisted on it.

My grandad died, nan told me, defending our right to the oil in the desert. The middle-east was our creation, she would say, and we gave them power and money to protect what was ours. She had no time for anyone, particularly Muslims, who argued otherwise. They would not be with grandad and my brother, dining at the table of the Almighty. Grandad’s sacrifice would not be forgotten for the easy utility of streaming music or the sustainability of solar panels- even if they were made from polymerised siloxanes.

When my older brother died, all his wooden toys were stored in cardboard in the loft; abandoned to degrade. I had refused to play with them, which upset nan at the time. They had been bought by her for dad, passing to my brother when he was born. I didn’t know dad and I didn’t want to play with a dead boy’s possessions. There being no-one else, they were banished to the purgatory of nan’s attic.

I was a valetudinarian boy, fussed over by nan because she was scared to lose me like she had both grandad and my brother. Thus, I would accelerate the slightest sniffle into pneumonia; trivial pain into a broken bone; minor acid reflux into a heart attack. She would fret over me: chastising me if she thought I was going cycling without my helmet; admonishing me for jumping down the last couple of stairs of a flight; denying me permission to climb the beautifully gnarled black alder that grew in her substantial gardens; pleading with me to eat my greens; the list was endless.

I struggled to understand why she was so fixated on me living for as long as possible, given it was all just deferring the day I would sit with grandad and my brother at God’s side. She would be there first, of course, but the thought of her scrutinising my every move from above, especially now I was conscious of the wonders of onanism – putting on a latex sheath first, of course, not only to prevent mess, but also for the feel of the cool material on my sensitive parts – was terrifying. I had only just persuaded myself that grandad and my brother would have better things to do than watch me wank.

Nan had her staff keep a very clean house. Given she was so fixated on hygiene, it made no sense to me why she didn’t substitute all the wood for hardier, cleaner, man-made surfaces.

My family was very wealthy; lots of oak and rare hardwoods attested to that. Amongst her prize possessions was a violin, a Stradivarius called Molitor, made in 1697 by the great man himself. Nan had told me that it was once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte and that it was the most beautiful, fragile and precious object in the world. She was a reasonable player, but I don’t think she was what you would call virtuoso. She loved Molitor and when it wasn’t being loaned to famous violinists, she would play for sycophantic visitors. Kristof Barati once proclaimed, to the amusement of the coterie who had assembled in the ballroom to hear him play, that she loved it like a child. ‘More so’, she had replied to shrieks of laughter.

Onetime nan was convalescing in a private hospital after minor surgery. The vinyl wrap I chose was matt black, timeless and tasteful; simple and elegant. For two days I worked tirelessly, taking particular care to ensure that the f-holes and scrolls were properly defined; working around the waist and bouts to keep the sharp lines; ensuring that the pegs and the fine tuners worked exactly like before. When I took the back off to do the inside, the only part I left exposed was the label, visible through the f-holes. After all, I wanted the world to know for all time that this was the genuine Molitor.