Andrew Walker

Following the astounding feedback that has been received from my last foray into investigative journalism I felt that I’d best get the second instalment out before the lynch mob catches up in the vain hope that it will stop them for a while and give me a better chance of hiding from them. Anyway I managed to sneak out of the Paul Vanzella image factory whilst Jo No Clothes was ‘ re-educating ’ Paul on what she considers acceptable behaviour. His screams for mercy drowned out the sound of my escape! Okay I appreciate that it was cruel of me to leave him, but fair reader, I was lucky to escape with my notebook! She’s a wild animal and as soon as I can enlist the help of 3 Commando Brigade I will return to save that poor, poor man from the clutches of that venomous wild woman.

Get on with it I hear you cry…
So what about the next instalment, well after much research and a twenty minute scan around the favourites board, I noticed that there’s this bloke called Mel Brackstone doing strange things down on the beach. Stop with the dirty thoughts you lot, I mean with his camera!... Oh, that makes it sound positively disgusting.

Anyway, moving along I went down to the bubble beach. The bubble beach is very different to the beaches that I’m used to elsewhere, the water doesn’t look like it usually does it’s more like a milkshake than normal water, and as for the clouds and sky well that’s just plain weird ! It was here that I first spotted silhouette of the man-mountain that is Mel Brackstone , he stood there with the surf crashing around him standing at least 7 foot tall and as wide as a garage door, the water seemed to part rather than try to wash him away. I was surprised that this giant was the creator of so many amazing yet delicate pictures. There was a loud crack which I initially thought was the sound of a rifle being fired, I later discovered that this was the manual shutter release of Mel’s salt encrusted camera. The shot taken he started wading to shore, a mass of thick unkempt dirty orange hair was the first thing I saw of the giant as clouds shrouded the rising sun and allowed me my first clear view of this man mountain.

Dear readers, I know there has been at least one fact niggling one or two of you up until this moment, may I point out at this stage that I had only managed 20 minutes of research before heading down to the beach, most of this had involved my locating flip flops, bucket and spade and tying knots in a hankie. It had completely escaped me that Mel could be a girl’s name, and her appearance in the surf had only affirmed my assumptions that Mel was indeed a big fella. Dear god was this woman huge! She towered over me, legs like tree trunks were encased in rubber waders, grief I never realised that rubber could stretch like that, or that it came in such large sizes! Her torso was encased in a dirty green waxed cotton jacket, well I assumed it was, on closer inspection I realised that it was a modified boy scouts tent. Readers, can I state for the record right here that Mel Brackstone is indeed a BIG WOMAN, some might say manly, what is certain is that she has a strange musky smell about her, it was hard to explain but certainly was a concoction between damp seaweed and decaying fish, I put it down to a life spent on the seashore and felt certain that it was in my best interest not to mention it.

Her eyes a very pale washed out blue, were distant as though they focused 10 feet beyond the back of my head. Later research has revealed that this is a chronic eye condition of extreme long-sightedness and is an occupational hazard for the true landscape artist, some of the great landscape artists could not see anything closer than half a mile. Indeed Mel’s condition was well on the way to this level of severity. She realised that I was there and with effort focussed in on me, Imagine a seven foot giant woman with wild ginger hair going cross eyed in front of you and you try not to laugh? Trust me the smell stopped everything apart from a smirk. “MY BEACH” she shouted, her voice so loud it nearly burst my eardrums! “MY BEACH, MY BEACH GET YOUR FILTHY CARCASS OFF MY BEACH”. It was right about this moment that I realised that all this time on the beach and constantly listening to the crashing of surf had resulted in a certain level of mental health issues for the lady. Either that or she was really pissed off about me being on her beach and my running away screaming “help, help crazy giant lady on the loose”.

Following my abortive attempt to interview Mel Brackstone I decided to find out more about the wild lady of the beach and why she behaves like she does. Interviews with some of the other beach bums that have made their homes in the sand dunes around the beach have revealed the crazy world of Mel Brackstone . She moved here as a child and now considers the beach as her front room. The time alone has resulted in her now being as mad as a box of frogs, she now see’s the whole area as hers , when she sleeps she uses old free papers as her sheets, which not only explains the titles to a lot of her photo’s and the destruction of the amazon for wood pulp, when she catches anyone taking pictures from her beach she forces them to hand over their camera and sells the artist into slavery as stock photographers!! C’mon why would they lie, I mean , beach bums, salt of the earth they are (and so willing to share their stories for a bottle of cheap booze). And so dear readers, I draw the curtains on another sad and pitiful image of life from within the bubble… sleep well.

^{please note that all comments are completely fictitious and intended to be humorous. The journal relates to my interpretation of the art and to stories that I make up about the artist as a bubble characters rather than focusing on the real people behind the art
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