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Coked-up Kate Moss is less important than a Large Wooly Pink Sheep
by Deborah Taylor
In Italy, they've created a 200-foot long pink bunny rabbit and stuck it on the side of a hill. Genius idea. When I first saw it, I thought that maybe I'd been partying too hard with Kate Moss, but no. This is, to all intents and purposes, quite real. No matter how much white powder I shovel up my nose, or how much time I spend standing next to Pete Doherty (and let's face it, the air around that man has to be around 40% proof, like a good rum), nothing will change the fact that the rabbit exists. It will also be there until 2025, so you probably have a good chance to go and visit it.
It's been produced by a group of artists called Gelatin. (Which means, as a vegetarian, I can't touch them.) It does pose a number of questions, none of which the group seem prepared to answer. Firstly, how will they wash it? It's made of wool, it'll stretch in the rain and will eventually start to smell worse than Bob Geldolf's arse. And where will it go in 2025? Will it be donated to a really big baby?
Also, why do the Italians get a stupidly huge pink rabbit on their hillside, whereas we only get chalk men and horses? The Australians have big things. Seriously big things, lying around all over the place, from mushrooms to Murray cods to Triceratops. It's like the Australians see a bit of space and think to themselves, well, clearly what's missing here is a thirty-foot tall pencil, that'd just set the view off just right. But in an Australian accent.
Yet the last great thing we did was put a few stones into a bit of a circle and then left it at that. They don't even look like anything. We didn't even decorate them. It's quite pathetic, really. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. It's just showing a total lack of imagination.
So why can't we do anything like this, what's holding us back? Well, I'm afraid the answer is quite simply drugs. It has to be. Everyone nowadays seems to be on drugs. Not just Kate or Pete. Though it's a surprise there's any left for anyone else the way Pete's going at it. I bet he eats all the peanuts and Bombay mix in bars too. But, according to the tabloids, everyone is on drugs in this country.
(Except for me. This is, you must understand, not a moral stand I'm taking. I just don't want to take any pills or poppers or lick a toad's back. I find the world bewildering enough, without adding talking, magenta baboons to the mixture. They'd just get in the way of the singing, blue chipmunks. Besides, I have alcohol.)
And then if we're not taking drugs, we're too busy chasing the people who are. Taking photos of them, shaming them, victimising them. Or scaring people about the horrors of drugs and drug-crime. Or whether we should legalise this or demonise that. Or writing and reading about drugs.
We're obsessed with drugs. It won't be long before we follow Holland's route and start to introduce drugs into our Reality TV, thus combining two rather poor national obsessions into one hellish whole.
This is all a shame, because it would be a much better world to live in if we were all obsessed with knitting a bloody big, pink rabbit rather than the drugged-up people lying on its belly chatting with it.
About the author
Deborah Taylor is a band manager, events organiser and the uber-glorious Messageboard Moderator of Mookychick.co.uk. She also writes short stories that will twist your head and a regular mooky opinion column. You may send her roses, top hats and fair-trade rum.
