I’m a fiddler. It’s ok, I’ve had years of coming to terms with it, and I’m mostly fairly restrained, limiting myself to balls of blu-tack and the occasional corporate tchotchke. At home, I took up knitting, just to have something to do with my hands, and though I was singularly untalented at it, I did manage to make a blanket, which comes in very handy for anyone who’s home and ill, languishig on the sofa.

But especially, inveterately, I’m a fiddler with candles, as anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of sitting with me in an atmospherically-lit pub will be able to testify.

There’s just something satisfying to the furtive fiddler about the sensation of poking a hole in the top warm wall of a lit candle, and watching the pool of molten wax spill out onto the candleholder like lava. You poke it, and it almost burns, then turns into a petal of opacity on your fingertip. Of course once it starts to cool and harden, you can squish it and reform it, and melt it in the flame which birthed it to begin with. Hours of endless fun - for you, if not for the poor pub staff who have to clear up dozens of scraps of tiny waxy confetti from your table at the end of the night.

Anyway, as any fiddler will know, you can find yourself creating odd - and possibly very telling - forms with your blu-tack, or wax, or whatever. There’s a man I work with who makes the most beautiful smooth cubes of blu-tack during meetings. In fact, there’s a whole online museum dedicated to things people have made out of blu-tack - true masters of the art. That’s a level to which I can merely aspire.
And yet, the other night, in a quiet Fulham pub and eating house (their words, not mine), during a lengthy and wandering conversation with S, I found that I had semi-wittingly created out of molten wax and nimble fingers the very definite forms of:

a) a tiny mouse, complete with ears and tail and
b) a faithful interpretation of The Sword In The Stone (although to be fair it looked a little more like The Sword In The Pebble)

I’m not known for my love of rodents or Athurian legend, so can only assume that these two forms are deeply revealing about my inner mind at the moment. Your guess is as good as mine: answers on a postcard, please.

the story of a sword, stone, candle, mouse, meg and stripes, originally uploaded by stephanieontour.

Mind you, they’re probably not half as revealing as the neckline of the stripy jumper I was wearing… I had no idea it was quite so plunging!