For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

taxidermist, so as to preserve its full covering of the head,
with even the horns and eyes and EARS AND LIPS, and also
the legs down to the hoofs, and sometimes even the hoofs
are retained – even, perhaps, sods of drying earth as wedges
protruding from the base of the hooves – even, occasionally,
the skeleton of some Neanderthal foetus, dangling limp
from that stiletto of earth. Beneath that, newspaper spread
out (the sports section) to catch the clods of mud satisfyingly
freed from between the underdeveloped toe-bones
with a butter knife. This is the way it goes. Tough shit.)
[...]
It is a well observed
fact that, when
provided with an
appropriate amount
of terracotta clay
(as opposed to
that grey, Com-
prehensive-school
stuff), elderly
outpatients in
particular will
more often than
not roll a near-as-
damn-it sphere
between their two
dorsal palms. This,
however, is a fleeting
form: almost immediately
afterwards – after a couple of ponderous moments
holding the spheroid aloft between forefinger and thumb (and
perhaps a couple more moments observing the Celtic dying of
the other hand’s palm with terracotta blush) – the sphere will
be squashed into a disk, the disk then rolled into an extruded
spiral, the extruded spiral then homogenised, SUBSIDED into
a cylinder. A few moments attempting to flatten the ends,
then the clay is discarded. (We found one of these on the
bedside table beside the marble paperweight which happened
to be weighing horribly heavy on the manuscript they’d been
desperately trying to finish before the end. This at least was
to no avail; you got bored reading it and, against the assumed