P est pour Poupette-à-L'Épingle

♪♫♪ Like a Puppet full of Piiiiiiinnnnnnns ♪♪♫! As mentioned yesterday, or seemingly the day before (I've had a few days off with a crock-ankle, and have lost track of time!), I have had some success with hedgehogs for the tree, again this year, with two from Gisela Graham, one from someone else and a duplicate from a few years ago, which I haven't shot, it was the bottle-brush one with little black-wooden feet sticking out.

 

These came in a few weeks ago now, and one is furry like a soft-toy, but on a wooden former so more solid than it looks, the other is another of the all natural materials, like the nut-husk ones which started this particular niche, a few years ago now, and is one of the Gisela G's.

 

This is the other Gisela Graham, and while it has the same bottle-brush face as several of the others (there's about 15 now?), the body is made of gold-chrome finished wire bag-ties! Which came as a relief, because my eyesight's so bad these days, I thought it was a delicate twiggy thing, like the nut-husk ones, sprayed with gold/silver chrome, and actually it is one of the more substantial ones.

 

It struck me, that these display an amazing property of humans, all of them look like hedgehogs. They don't look like mice, or voles, or rats, or tailess squirrels, they don't look like gophers, or moles, coypu or rabbits, hares . . . beavers or lemmings. They don't even look much like echidnas, despite being mixed collections of glued together scraps, or painted blown-glass, they all look like hedgehogs!

 

And that is down to our imagination in how we construct them, and our cognitive ability to recognise what they are then supposed to represent. When we're not butchering each other, or ripping each-other off, which we do most of the time, almost everywhere, at every level, we are capable of wonderful things.

 

And yet we stand here, on the brink of extinction, voting for the wrong people, running-down our public services, allowing our infrastructure to fade, failing to tax the super-rich or regulate the tech giants, and we wonder why our hearts feel so bad?