Weather report

Reports of a ‘significant quantity’ of external mist have been confirmed by inspectors in the village green area after overnight winds. The winds themselves have been contained but clumps of mist persist and are being analysed by the authorities.

What we know about the clumps so far:

Clump a
Inside this clump of mist are the treasured memories of Dot; a former arts administrator. This memory clump includes several experiences, including one day, her shock upon seeing the word rainwater - accidentally at a wedding - she saw the word rainwater on a hand made sign and felt quite unable to proceed with her role in the wedding. She was aunt - that was her role. Not an official role not designated, you’d say, but a role as she saw it - this much is confirmed by the mist analysis. Aunt Dot at the wedding. She cried unendingly during the procedure - by which we mean ceremony, but these are not our memories - she cried and had a hot itch because of the word rainwater in aerial font on a laminated sign.

What Dot discovered in the word rainwater is not clear from the clump a.

Clump b describes another memory in which Dot  is at the table in the kitchen and her daughter is there and her daughter, somewhat too relaxed after a long day with her friends accidentally - in fact quite breezily - admits that the stain on the sleeve of her black t-shirt is semen. And then Dot automatically says oh right, whose semen then? Also too casually because this is not a conversation that they would normally have. And then the two of them are suddenly in the conversation but the conversation also has ended. So they are sitting in the silence of it. Like sitting in a collapsing, quilt igloo.

As Dot sits in silence with her daughter, she wonders why this igloo feeling is so powerful. She thinks why am I thinking of a quilted igloo? She then realises of course that she is gazing at the tea cosy.

The tea cosy is where her eyes have settled as a way of avoiding looking at the stain and also as a way of not talking. She is always looking at that tea cosy. She hates it, actually.

The tea cosy is an omen of things going to shit.

in clump b.1 Dot stands at the window and looks out. She has one hand inside the tea cosy. The quilting inside the tea cosy is hot and damp from the teapot. The teapot is on the table. Like an igloo she thinks to herself, just like the man said on antiques roadshow.

She had once taken the tea cosy to the antiques roadshow when it was at the castle grounds near her home. She queued for two hours. It wasn’t that the tea cosy had any real value, but she didn’t want to turn up empty handed. You never know, she told her appalled daughter. You never know twice more, and then she went alone to the antiques roadshow special at the castle.

this is just a quilted igloo, the man said. His name was Sod or Sid or Sam or something and he was wearing a grey cravat and a mustard suit and a hot pink shirt. This is a tea cosy, she said. I just brought it because you never know. My sister-in-law she said it was given to her in her will. She is dead now.

It’s an inverted quilt igloo, the antiques specialist insisted. Here - see this thread? This is where they would lean and tell each other stories. And here, in this regency decoration here, this looks like a comic scene doesn’t it? But look closer, and see this is a place to keep fishing nets. The story of this igloo, the man said, is a tragic one. This line of thread here tells us that the inhabitants gave up on the igloo - you see? They could not go on in their quilted lifestyle and so -

on and on he went and at no point did Dot have the courage to tell him it was a tea cosy. She brought it with her just because you never know.

later, after another queue a man with skin like a bag for life told her that her watch was worth 60-70 pounds.

clump b.2

Dot is holding the tea cosy because her friend is there and her friend is chastising her for not taking control of her life. But what Dot wanted was to be comforted against the loss of her job and her landlord wants to sell the house and everything seems like it’s fucked. And as the friend chastises her she looks at the tea cosy in her hands and the illustration of the puff of steam coming from the regency teapot that is being carried by a caricature butler, with his nose rising up, indecently long and cartilaginous. The connection you are supposed to make is with an erect penis, of course. This butler’s long nose and excessive round nostrils and the excess of skin that droops off it. It is a sign of his comic animalness. The Butler is horny and pathetic and imaginary and drawn on the side of an igloo that was once a family dream.

And dot is reminded of the penis of the husband of her friend, her friend who is at the table, being scathing and exasperated by Dot’s life choices, and revelling in her frustration that Dot won’t take control, and is sliding away into the nothingness.

You’re sliding away into nothingness! You’re staring into space, Dot! You need to take control!

And Dot just had nothing else to do except look at the butler and remember this friend’s husband’s penis. His ugly butler nose of a penis, bright white and veins of blue wine in the photographs that her friend’s husband sent, late one Thursday night, not long after the 2015 general election.

reisdue data
In the residue of the mist we can easily detect the reasoning that Dot has chosen to live out her days in the mist planes, alone and damp more or less entirely because of this tea cosy.