The Sculpture Garden

Heather has objects in her garden. “ ‘Statuary’ wouldn’t quite be the appropriate word,” she says.

There was a piece about it in the Guardian last year and it made a bit of a splash in the local paper and now the little garden of objects gets a few visits every week.

The objects are all weird and eccentric. There is an inflatable that blows up into different shapes and colours each time, randomly, when you activate it with a foot switch.

There is a clownish figure that chatters continuously and seems to be trying to tell you a story but every other word or so is bleeped out. You just get fragments, never the sense of it.

Every half an hour it says “Please change my cassette” and you open a little door into the stomach and turn over the cassette in an old Walkman sitting there.

Hanging from a line strung between two posts is an object shaped like a stirrup. On one of the posts is a notice: “The stapes bone is shaped like this but much smaller — in fact it is the smallest of the 270 bones in your body. Without it you would not be able to hear properly. Before you go tell me how you think it enables you to hear.”

In a small shed there is a visitors’ book, and a second notebook called The Stapes Bone. On the inside page it says: “If you can correctly define the function of the stapes bone, I will send you a bottle of apple juice, pressed from the apple varieties that grow in my orchard. The mix of varieties changes every year depending on the seasons, as does the flavour of the juice.”

“It’s a tribute to curiosity and great eccentrics with vivid imaginations like Lewis Carroll”, Heather says. “ ‘Reality’ is a prison.”

I want to read Alice in Wonderland again. 

I said to Heather: “How would Lewis Carroll portray this moment in our lives?”