Elephants In The Room

24th April

The email in the previous post is probably connected to my attempt to introduce our Production Manager to village society before I left her there to fend for herself.

Soon after she arrived in France, I took Miss Whiplash to the village yoga class. I am a good head higher than the tallest woman in the village, we have all got used to me being the village giant, when I brought along a new classmate who stands head and shoulders above me.

Miss W tried her best to mingle but the local accent is strong, her French didn’t work and she and the villagers found each other mutually unintelligible, so although the class were impressed by her height and leopard skin leotard, everyone became too embarrassed by this failure to communicate and soon got on with their business as though she weren’t there (there is always a half hour of gossip before the class starts). Miss W spent the evening with a grin clamped on her face to prove that she is basically friendly, but being ignored makes one feel invisible.

I am currently obsessed with the idea of invisibility/visibility partly because I have taken a couple of weeks away from the insect filming to do a job in an Arabic country. I am transfixed by the way the Arabs float around in their flowing robes while the western visitors walk among them looking like raw sausages.

There are plenty of muslim women with their faces completely uncovered and they easily make eye contact with me but the ladies who peep out through a letter box in their face coverings and the ones who are completely covered behave as though they are invisible. What I hadn’t realised was how different these garments can be, there is an abaya shop close to where I am staying, in the window are styles cut in different ways, decorated with pearls, diamante and embroidery, I was particularly struck by a pleated and diamante-studded abaya that clearly inspired the Darleks. Outside this shop swings a large sign with a painted image of a woman wearing a black abaya, her hands and face originally in the painting are now covered over by three crude blocks of black paint


*no time to do a fancy image today, that one’s straight out of the tin from Crazy Spandex Girls