A Jolly Good Easter Holiday In Paddington’s London [II] Photograph

Oh for heaven’s sake, click once more on the image again to ease your viewing experience! I have no wish at this point in time to be dragged into the courts on the trifling complaint that I bulldozed the contents of your eyeballs into porridge fit for consumption by a newborn baby! Are we ready now? Proceed! In our second juicy segment from the ancient labyrinthine capital that slowly but surely lifted the rainy days of the past away from above that adorable Bear’s furry head and place in its stead the sunnier clime of a loving family and a home to call his own, you will be glad to learn that London was once again privy to some madcap antics courtesy of one highly bombastic Easter reunion! Am I falling foul again of pushing the limits of extravagant preludes and not getting to the point? Ah, righty-o, you’re the fidgety sort, in that case, let’s make haste and get cracking! Now, I will congratulate you for your sincerest loyalty to my wordy world if you are able to recall an earlier story of mine in which a sneaky ‘Tiger’ was wily enough to hop onto a London red double-decker bus and take a spin – unpaid of course! - round the skittish mayhem that is Piccadilly Circus! Ring any bells? No, no, I do not ask you whether the buses come equipped with ding-a-ling-ling bells! I mean to say, have I jogged any of those retired grey slugs in your brain pertaining to an older story involving a tiger who played truant? Oh, I have! Well, I never! Good show! Back to the present, the photograph you see of our pretty Nuha stood stock-still with the impeccable composure of a Buddhist monk in a messy warzone of racing mice happens to be quite the embarrassing prosecuting evidence against the efficiency of the British Police. Our ‘Bobbies’ are perhaps the most genteel and soft-hearted chaps and chapettes in the law enforcement universe however as a result of their high empath status a knock-on effect on their cognitive faculties has often been the blight of their reputation. The police chap you see in the background was on patrol duty on the day my reported ‘Tiger’ swooshed past the electronic billboard in Piccadilly Circus. That was last year’s story, right? Alas and alack dear reader, behold with your own eyes what such peculiarities of experience do to a man – to be frozen permanently on the spot and, as if that was not enough to reconcile with, all the ice-cubes in every freezer in the world I hear is suffering from an incurable inferiority complex as a result! All because of one escaped cat! Giggle, giggle! Tania’s jumper once again making such sumptuous headlines with its bold bright red shout that I have spotted some of my fledgling strawberries already deliberating that her woolly highness should consider candidacy as the Prime Minister of Strawberries in the upcoming general elections! In this high-octane action scene, Tania is seen pulling the chains in the park. I was later told in furtive whispers that this is how she flushes bossy dictatorial teachers down the plughole! It is a remote controlled invention, what else could you possibly want to know?! Duh! ‘King Tut’ scaled every single apparatus in the park, nothing untouched, including gruelling contraptions that would have had our best soldiers holding onto their grandma’s hand and, I emphasise this in flashing neon lights, not once did his spectacles nudge a hair’s width from his eyes! Oh how droll of you to even think for a second that he resorted to the cunning trickery of applying chewing gum to affix the ends behind his ears! Humbug! My question to you, my dear reader, do you possess the raw guts to cross and overcome life’s icky hurdles without losing touch of your one true vision…? Do not sigh so much that it reaches me as a tsunami gust, my roof tiles cost me a fortune! It is not long before the British Museum slides back into the limelight and in this cheeky scene all of us, not just Nuha and ‘King Tut’, momentarily deviated from our official purpose of visit and indulged in a health-boosting dose of hide-n-seek! The poor South American statue of an ancient tax officer was more than delighted to partake in our naughty digressions! I never ever thought it possible that a tax collector could ever occupy such a place of awesomeness in my books! Giggle, giggle! No, no Rana Mama, you have got it all wrong and twisted and misshapen! Diesel does not make for successful living (T-shirt slogans are hugely telling of one’s dispositions)! Wellington boots, violins, books, tea and silver moonlight win me any day but the smoothie sludge of fossilised creatures, I do not think so! Get with the programme, Mama! I shall acquit you this time round since you are doing a most marvellous job in this photograph at making two very fine ladies smile as if they are welcoming a national hero back to the homestead! Close shave Mama, close shave! Up next I am very much inclined to believe that the distinguished and preliminary architect of the British Museum, Sir Robert Smirke, would have announced that the mighty columns of his building, harking back to the stylistic convention of Classical Greece, have finally found their missing pieces! A triptych of precious stones - my delightful little cousins - adorn the base columns and somehow it does feel as though a man whose vision of lines and structures that began in the long gone past has finally achieved completion. All buildings have a merit of their own, in their artistic and functional essence but, in the end they are but a multi-dimensional canvas of potential epics and it is only when people are paired to them, be it by occupation under their roofs or in the way they treat the space in which it stands, that the architectural lines grow into the enlightenment of a meaningful story. An intriguing excerpt of stone inscriptions and figures cover the outer walls of the magnificent sarcophagus of Hapmen of the 26th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. I was instantly drawn to it and, even though the public are forbidden to touch artefacts at the museum, my resistance failed me and I stroked the cool engravings, hoping that my palm would somehow translate the message for me. I discovered a little later that it had been used for ritual washing at one time and thus the more sensual name of ‘Lover’s Fountain’ was ascribed to it. I do feel a secret shiver of excitement at the whimsical idea that the marmalade orange streak running through the man’s body might be my own fountain pen from another life… When a man has no qualms to be photographed in his bedtime robes and can still issue a hearty smile to compel the lens to wobble with giggles then he will resemble exactly as my Big Uncle in this next photograph! Don’t both my uncles gleam with the fresh and much coveted sprite of infancy? A hairless head is a most beautiful thing in a man! Giggle, giggle! And lastly, the ancient ‘daughter of the mountain’, Parvati is sensually sat on her lover’s knee, the Lord Shiva. Originating from 13th Century Orissa, India, I smirked and blushed to myself as I gazed upon their eternal union and if that wasn’t enough to steal my breath away I received the most amazing vindication of my life-long disinterest and boredom with fancy expensive cars. How? The ‘vehicles’ of these two deities, Shiva and Parvati, can be seen beneath their feet. Shiva stands atop the headstrong bull and, well, she could only ever possibly settle for the golden-mane lion… Photography & Words: © Masufa Khatun | Mazzy Khatun Photo Stories | Spring Reunion Series | London | UK 2015

Photography:Color on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:39.4 W x 31.5 H x 0.4 D in

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