Trick skull
(Chalk skull: Glasgow, Scotland)
As I was walking home last night, pondering which photograph I could use for a post, I spotted this. I either take a photograph that I know I will certainly use to write about, or I search through recent photographs to find one worth commenting on. This one leapt out just as I was wondering if I had anything worth saying. This is a set of steps connecting my street with the one running parallel – there are many of these strange stairway cuts in Glasgow, joining two roads via a steep slope, too sheer for a mere steady gradient. This skull is very new as it wasn’t there a couple of days ago, the last time I passed this way. If I cycle, I avoid this route, but on foot it is by far the quickest and easiest way to my flat from a particular direction.
It appears very light in the picture, although I took it after 10pm – it is brighter here than it appeared at the time, but not by much. Each year, each and every year, the long days surprise and enchant me – they hold promise of extra warmth, sun and of an extension of usable daylight. Basically they offer less monotony than the longer nights, they are breathing life into Summer in a way that I never experienced in Asia. The nights were never as short as here, never so Nordic and clear. That clarity has allowed me to notice the skull, scrawled in chalk on each step of the flight. It has been done in such a way that the whole image is only visible from the bottom step – no higher. It is a trompe l’oeil that fragments as one ascends the stairs.
On one level, the skull omits a warning; these steps are lethal in wet or frosty weather – the balustrade on the right hand side splits the stairs in half. The other section of stair has been completely eroded by the freakish winter cold and I (and surely many others) slipped and could have fallen from them. They were the exact combination of treacherously slippery coupled with just the perfect amount of crumbliness that rendered them utterly deadly. Perhaps the skull is a admonition of the steps’ state – or perhaps it is simply an art experiment, or maybe some students were intoxicated and decided to have some fun with chalk. I revel in the not knowing.
– Today Rosie is stitching many a Mackintache in Glasgow, Scotland –
