Hugh Bowden 2009

Full of good intentions, but hampered by the cold (mine and the climate's), I ended up 4qating at home. In my study, on a piece of yellow A4 paper, watched over by a miniature bronze Anubis, resting on a plinth made of a piece of limewood from Moss & Co. above a signed copy of Come Dance with Me, I wrote the following:

Dangling from his beak is a dead rabbit who looks exactly like Peter Rabbit without the blue jacket. Bubo bubo's dreadful amber eyes say simply, "It has fallen to me to do this. It is my lot." His fierce woolly owl-babies huddle before him waiting for their dinner.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, ch. 4
4 February 2009 sa4qe.blogspot.com

Taken one way, it seems to me, there is something of the horror of H.P. Lovecraft in this revelation of the implacable ferocity that lies behind the eyes of an ordinary eagle owl in a zoo. In part it is the juxtaposition of death and feeding with children's literature - consciously in the case of Peter Rabbit, precognitively with Owl Babies, a children's classic yet to be drawn and written in 1975.

Okay, so the only people likely to see this ensemble in the flesh are my wife and children, who will consider it typical eccentricity, but thanks to Gombert and the spirit of SA4QE the photo may get wider viewing. The bronze watcher and his plinth are all souvenirs of the Some-poasyum.