And then it came true…
I wrote (and illustrated) Isabella Down to Earth: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Up Mortals partly for fun, and partly to take a half-affectionate, half-critical look at some of our modern urban obsessions. Not least was the foodie thing, or rather the affluent middle-class’s eagerness to leap on that particular bandwaggon. I had great fun doing the collages for the dinner party that the so-called Dan Prince (really the Fairy Prince Daniello) throws for some friends and neighbours. I finished the story some years back, but having had great trouble with the new Blogger software which users were forced to adopt in 2021, didn’t manage to get it posted online until just recently, in late 2022.
Here’s the collage of the starters, which according to one character, who resignedly expects starters to be weird, are:
“… kind of little boats. Well, little bits of food, sitting in little boats. Some were little lettuce leaves—maybe. Well, he sort of recognised them. Only once you tasted the stuff you realised that these starters were not normally weird.”
Note the little boat made from endives belges (“chicory” if you’re British, “witloof” or “witlof” in Australasia), top left and again, centre right; here it is in close-up:
In another scene, Oberon, Merlin and Puck have chicken with pomegranate seeds for dinner:
I exaggerated the pomegranate thing, which had only just become terrifically trendy, with a scattering of little glowing red heart shapes.
So today, 16 December 2022 NZ time, I found this on The Observer’s website:
… Er, yeah. Well, it’s laugh or cry, really, isn’t it?
So have a good laugh, and a great Christmas 2022!
