Event Horizon – Tall Tales from an Alternate Totnes
It had to happen. In a town so ebulliently creative, where absolutely everybody was an artist of sorts, the annual Totnes Open Studios/House art event (TOSH) had ground to a halt.
Problems arose when high-end London burglars became aware that arty, well-to-do middle-class folk were gleefully throwing their doors open to any Tom, Dick and Tarquin during an extended weekend once a year. The event became an annual jolly for them. They’d gather in First Class on the train down from Paddington, bingeing on Bolly, sporting French berets and Sir Peter Blake jackets, all in high in spirits at being able to freely case joints with proper Totnes late-night shopping in mind.
Consequently, for several years Totnes had one of the highest crime rates in the UK.
Reluctantly TOSH circled its wagons, and made the event strictly local-local. But therein lay the rub – with an entire town housebound, leaving their front doors ajar, in bated expectancy that someone might nip in and extol the virtues of their artistic endeavours, there was no one local left to visit and view. Totnes had painted itself into a corner.
However…
Over in the less-rarefied part of Totnes, under the flight path of the Totnes Yogic-Flying Airport, Walter Grimbald, stood in the kitchen of his nondescript bungalow methodically making an egg mayonnaise sandwich. He stared sullenly out at his low-maintenance, gravelled yard space, void of foliage and flower, and let out a plaintive sigh.
It was that TOSH time of the year again.
Unmated, solitary, and utterly artless, Walter took strange comfort in the fact that the UK has more names for the colour beige than the Inuit have for snow. Yet for the duration of the TOSH event, this lonely bastion of normal was the most popular and revered person in town. For it fell upon Walter, by dint of him being the only person in Totnes not exhibiting during TOSH, to become its viewing audience of one.
From dawn to dusk, for the four days of the event’s duration, he’d speed walk from door to door. With no time for fripperies, he’d stride into a house, cluelessly glance at whatever was on offer, and each time exclaim “My, that’s delightful. It forms the perfect contract with the eye!”
Having dished out the complimentary daub of dopamine so necessary for the creative process, he’d step backwards out onto the pavement and, like an errant cuckoo clock, work the town’s streets. He had no idea what formed “the perfect contract with the eye”. It was something he heard when listening to BBC Radio Four by mistake.
Last year’s foray into the Totnes art world had been particularly gruelling for him. Things were getting crazy out there: The swivel-eyed South Streeter that shoved stretched canvasses between the strings and hammers of his upright piano, then poured tins of Day-Glo acrylic in, to play classical ‘paint tunes’ with virtuoso gusto. One of which, entitled, “Putting On The Litz”, had fetched £1.5 million in a New York auction house. Walter had found that grating, considering his own slender means.
Also the moon-jabbering Reiki teacher fashioning hirsute Dartmoor landscapes using discarded man-buns from the hipster era.
Add to that the unnerving experience of Walter being cornered in a room, while a retired dominatrix – all those years servicing the local Men’s Group, guilt- flagellated a canvas with sadistic brio using bunches of River Dart bulrushes dipped in jet-black Indian Ink.
And of course the cat paintings – an endless stream of 2D feline renditions, their elliptical pupils burning into to his frayed psyche.
At the end of the TOSH event, Walter would limp back to his bungalow, his herculean house-call task complete. He’d lower the blinds, collapse into his armchair, and slowly work his way through a bumper book of word-grid puzzles, desperate to mind-bleach himself from it all.
It would be no different this time round.
With a resigned air, Walter gently compressed his egg mayonnaise sandwich using the flat of his palm. Normally he’d cut the sandwich crossways, but for some reason the bread knife hovered, and without any notion of form following function, he cut it diagonally. It was the most creative thing he’d ever done. With a sheet of greaseproof paper he wrapped the sandwich, then placed it into his grey rucksack along with a flask of builder’s tea.
He walked into the hallway, slid the front door open against the pile of freshly-delivered TOSH flyers, and saddled the rucksack. With shoulders back, and tone-deaf to the early–morning birdsong, he walked out into the street, looked at the house opposite, saw a curtain twitch, and strode valiantly towards its open front door.