1976, an object, the honey monster

Do I have strong feelings about the honey monster? Not really. I’ll be honest with you, I did no research for this one. I just knew I was going to visit my mom and reckoned there’d be loads of things from my childhood there that I could spin out to five hundred words. It was only as I was walking around her house with my phone, not taking photos of things, that I realised she is actually quite good at keeping her house up to date. It wasn’t something I’d ever really thought about, the transition of stuff at other people’s house. The world exists independently of our thoughts. You don’t miss your mother’s knick knacks until they’ve gone.

So anyway, I googled ‘things invented in 1976′ and it was this or Double Deckers (the chocolate bars, not the buses, which date back to 1853, in Paris, where someone decided a two-storey carriage was the sort of thing that should be tied to a horse. Or several horses, I guess. Still a bit steep, metaphorically, and possibly literally, in my opinion.

Which brings us to the honey monster which was, for a decade or so, a cool-looking misshapen lump with massive eyes and a winning personality. He looks like a wanker nowadays, of course. Airbrushed and shop-ready. No anarchy. No chaos. Just marketing. I blame Seb Coe, for reasons I can’t be bothered going into at this point. But trust me, as conspiracies go, it’s a corker.

I mean, I have absolutely nothing to say about the character or my memories of it. I once had a sticker with him on that I stuck on the back of my Action Man jeep, possibly on a holiday in Cornwall, or Devon, but the memory is almost certainly only partially real. The other things I remember of that holiday; a tractor, a tube, a stairway, a door in an upstairs bedroom that opened to outside (presumably because the house was set into a hill) are based on photos taken at the time, or nonsense, or nothing. The sticker fell off the jeep. The jeep was passed down to a friend’s little brother. Nothing tangible remains. Nothing is permanent. Everything can be whittled away until only hope remains, and then that too, in time, will fade. Tell ’em about the honey, mummy.