You know how sometimes you’re walking through a garden centre and you see a garden ornament in the shape of, for example, a Meerkat dressed in a Fireman’s coat and helmet? And you stop and look at it for a minute, and wonder what on earth would make anyone buy it?
And then you decide you’re being really uncharitable, because it would be am awfully dull world if we all liked the same stuff? And after all, who’s to say there’s anything objectively wrong with wanting to have a garden ornament in the shape of a Meerkat dressed as a fireman, but only from the waist upwards – leaving its tail and haunches entirely naked and bare?
And then sometimes, you see a garden ornament, and you’re all like –
Truly. Who is there, on this entire frickin’ planet, who would ever, EVER want to own a stone which can unzip a massive scary eyeball so it can look at you from behind the begonias?
Tim prefers to accessorise his garden with adorably Emo zombie-girls, the severed heads of his enemies, and life-sized statues of Johnny Depp.
Just in case you thought this might just be some strange, one-off buying error – like the time I accidentally bought a bright orange batwing jumper made out of nylon wool, under the temporary delusion that it was a brilliantly fashion-forward choice that would win me great kudos at the school disco – there are an entire fixture of these things.
Really. A huge, three-tier rack of disturbingly realistic eyeball stones. Staring out at us from between their unzipped eyelids.
But hey, it’s only an eyeball, right? These stones can look at us, which is certainly pretty awful; but they can’t actually do anything to hurt us. It’s not as if they can unzip a gigantic mouth full of disturbingly white and well-formed –
– teeth.
Fuck.
Cassandra Parkin 