I have been trying to get organised this week (not for the first time as regular readers will know) and done a massive tidy of my office so that I now know where everything is and of course will from now on never let it get messy again. Like all the other times. As I have quite a bit of empty wall space in my house I decided to take one of my old framed show posters which had been leaning against a wall behind a sofa and put it up in my bathroom. I have a few other Richard Herring posters up in my office and this seems to be a good place for them as they are at least associated with work and it's not a place that other people will usually come up to, so they act as reminders of happy times (and when you've spent ten grand on an Edinburgh show it is nice to at least have a poster to show for it). But I feel a bit uncomfortable with putting them elsewhere as it looks a bit self absorbed or self congratulatory or just weird. Imagine for example that a new lover brings you back to their house for the first time and you discover their bedroom walls are filled with various images of themselves. That might freak you out a bit. Not as much as if their bedroom walls were filled with various images of you though. Some of them photos taken of you in unguarded moments by use of a telephoto lens.
But I always really liked the "Richard Herring is Fat" poster and it's quite witty and not exactly a flattering photo of myself and I thought it might be the kind of thing that I could get away with in a toilet situation, which also takes some of the vanity out of it.
But even though I am generally the only person to use this bathroom or possibly because of this, I am finding it an unsettling addition to the room. Firstly it really annoys me that whoever put the poster together spelt the world “puerile” as “purile”. It’s something that I should have spotted before the poster went off to the printers and it’s unusual that I missed something so obvious, but it is now there forever and there’s nothing I can do about it and it spoils what would otherwise be a very good poster for me. I don’t mind people thinking I am puerile, but I hate the idea of them thinking I can’t spell.
But more importantly it’s a picture of me naked. It’s tasteful and you can’t see any of the naughty bits (even though I was totally naked for the shoot – I remember Peter Baynham coming into the studio to have his photos done next and being confronted by a somewhat startling scene. Now I think about it I don’t know why I had to be nude and suspect I was duped by the photographer and there are probably some full length shots out there somewhere on some kind of specialist and appalling website dedicated to naked fat men), but still it’s an odd sight to have to contend with each morning or when I am sitting on the loo or having a bath. Particularly as in the bath I also have to look at my actual naked and more flabby and less youthful body which puts things into some kind of sharp context. I have considered trying to pretend to myself that the poster is actually a mirror and that that is still how I look (which is sad when you think about it that I aspire to be as thin as the me in the picture), but I am not fooling anyone, not even myself.
ItÂ’s definitely an odd thing to have on display and I think it will have to go back to its previous location behind my sofa and of course up here on the internet for anyone to see. But you see that isnÂ’t as weird for some bizarre reason.
