Andrew Cranston

'Beautiful and Ugly: Nothing is more relative, let us say, more restricted, than our sense of the beautiful. He who would try to divorce it from the delight man finds in his fellows, would immediately lose his footing. "Beauty in itself," is simply
a word, it is not even a concept. [...] The judgement "beautiful" is the "vanity of his species"... A little demon of suspicion may well whisper into the skeptic's ear: is the world really beautified simply because man thinks it beautiful?'
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

Likes: the sound of birdsong, the smell of petrol, the feel of cashmere, yellow things.

Dislikes: the sound of a church organ, the smell of fish, the feel of charcoal, purple things.

It is said only sound, discordant or loud, is innately frightening and fears of snakes or spiders or other things of that order are conditioned, a child will play with a snake as happily as a pet rabbit unless told or shown otherwise. Like in that awful 'Little Albert' experiment in the 1920s. I was aware of this when Joseph as a baby happily played with a large mechanical toy spider.

I got to thinking of a 1970s children's TV puppet show called Hector's House, which I used to watch as a toddler, absorbed and slightly scared. I looked it up on YouTube and it is indeed unsettling.

It is set in a walled garden and follows the activities of a dog (Hector), a cat (Zsa Zsa) and a frog (Kiki). The whole atmosphere is nightmarish to me somehow, and Hector almost always ends up humiliated (gaslit even) by Zsa Zsa and Kiki. What gets me now re-watching it and maybe got me then is the eerie silences and sudden bursts of sounds, inane muttering, sarcastic laughter.

If you close your eyes, you could feel you were at a demented performance by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.