The price of fish…

Last night was one of those nights when I knew that going to bed was going to take me a while. A combination of evening hospital visiting, eating late, drinking red wine and the tragically early death of Steve Strange all combined to make my eyes stay open longer than is ever good for me.

I’ve always thought of Steve Strange as the Malcolm McLaren of the New Romantics. If not for him there probably wouldn’t have been any Spandau Ballet or Culture Club, there certainly wouldn’t have been Visage. Good thing or bad thing? I don’t know. I was a little too old for New Romanticism although of course it affected the music I listened to and the clothes I wore in my twenties. Poor Steve, he was only fifty-five, just a couple of years younger than me.

When I can’t sleep I sometimes doodle and when I doodle I often doodle fish. I’ve been doodling fish doodles since I was five and since my teens if I doodle a fish I usually get a touch of the Breugels. Oddly I never set out to doodle fish, they just arrive and once I’ve started even if I try to doodle something else it ends up quite often looking like a fish. Yes some of the fish in this doodle aren’t really fish at all – but then again of course they are.

I remember watching a report on the TV about the new romantics in the late seventies or early eighties. The clubbers from Blitz all dressed up in their finery - Dracula and gladiators, nuns, East End teds and posh boys. A not quite grown-up fancy dress really and when I saw boy George I remember thinking ‘look at that and the price of fish’ - a saying that I’ve never really understood but seemed so apt.

Anyway, it was about three before I went to bed. I fell asleep almost immediately and dreamed of a Breugal landscape and a man with a fish painted on his face.