Pancake Party 2015

Inventory of Jenny’s Living Room

-A record of the ULSCR pancake party 17/02/15

Green carpet & carpeted skirting boards¹.  Large windows with cream curtains that hang to just below waist height.  Wooden tool for opening such windows hanging from the rail in the join between the two curtains.

Curtains remained closed all night, excluding a brief interlude in which Jenny partially opened the left curtain to stick her head out of the window and hail Ben Mayer.

Ben was lost, presumably due to the unorthodox numbering of the houses on Jenny’s street.  Ben arrived after 9.30 and was castigated by the other guests for his irreverent lateness.

He made a verbal request that Jenny & two others should budge up so that he could sit on the sofa.  This, the only sofa in the room, sits against a wall opposite the one in which there is a door. Given the chance, a number of inebriated guests would no doubt have relished in referring to the door as an orifice, given that this absurd status had already been applied to a light fitting earlier in the evening.

On the wall behind the sofa there is a peculiar framed painting (possibly a print but one cannot get close enough to examine its surface because of the sofa). The painting depicts a group of seagulls flying into what looks like the exosphere (indicated by dark pigments applied to the top of the image). The frame looks like faux-marble. To the left of this, on the adjacent wall and left of the windows, is a framed sepia image of an owl. On the wall opposite (and thus directly opposite the windows) is an ambiguously jazzy image that says something like ‘jazz nightly’. Back on the wall opposite the door there are three interesting objects to the right of the seagulls. The first is a wind chime with a decorative blue elephant attached, suspended flat against the wall in such a position that it will certainly never chime. To the right of this is a wooden spoon, and to the right of this, a wooden fork hung marginally lower than the spoon. Both point to the ceiling with their handles and make (presumably false) allusions to a primitive source. Most likely they were manufactured by an amateur craftsman for the souvenir industry.

¹ “A company must have been offering a good price for wall-to-wall carpets, so another one upped them to include the skirting boards.”

By Alastair Hodgen