I like weird...

Yes, I know it is coming up Easter and not Halloween - and I suspect many of you will find morbid if not downright ugly what I am presenting you today. Well, even though I am neither a rock chick nor a goth teenager, I find skulls very sculptural and beautiful interesting in their own way. Maybe the whole decorating-with-skulls craze has already peaked and I am jumping onto the bandwagon just as it is pulling into the graveyard (if you pardon the pun), but if Damien Hirst can play with skulls, so can I!

As luck would have it, I am married to a former skull-enthusiast. Growing up, my partner had a large collection of skulls - sheeps', badgers', birds', donkeys', horses', you name it - and we have a number of them nowadays out on our garden walls. Anyway, looking at the a horse skull closely, I was fascinated by the play of light and shadows on the bone. (Can you tell I am a photographer, obsessed with light and shadow??) Can you spot him in the winter picture on the right? So, originally I gave the skull an undercoat of silver primer, with the intention of painting it some other colour and leaving it in the garden.

But then the skull just looked so well, so sculptural, so fascinating, that I decided to bring it inside and place it in our sitting room.  The top of our in-built cabinet was the perfect empty spot.

I had to make a stand on which to display the skull, otherwise it would have sat behind the moulding of the cabinet. Ok, I admit, my better half helped me with this - he drilled a hole into a bit of wood and an old chair leg (which had been washed onto the beach) and fixed the two together with a wooden dowel. Then we stuck a few clipped chopsticks through another hole to create two "arms" that the skull could rest on.

And that was it - up on the cabinet he went. He's leering at us, I guess... I wonder what kind of comments the skull will attract, both here and by my visitors?

Happy weekend, everyone!