Shanna and the Seed.

The Prize Produce Show at the village hall turned into a bit of an eye-opener. It wasn’t the produce that startled – although it was interesting to see onions half the size of footballs that seemed both spectacular and impractical in equal measure – but what you might call the ‘ancillary’ classes. These included The Silliest Looking Vegetable (and you can imagine what most of the carrots looked like,) Miniature Gardens laid out in baking trays, Vegetables Arranged to Look Like Animals, and Found Stones Purporting to be Something Else Entirely. The titles are mostly mine.

I noticed that a lot of the prize cards had the same name on them – Shanna Something-or-other. Her miniature garden had won third prize, although my ex-photographer’s eye perused them for a long time and decided that it should have come first by some distance. She had also won several other prizes in other classes. Her pièce de resistance, however, was the poodle. It was a small piece of cauliflower to which two eyes and a nose had been added in marker pen, and it really did look like a poodle sitting up and begging. It was a remarkable likeness. I had to talk to Shanna, and so I waited for the prize-giving in order to identify her.

She was a young girl of around thirteen, generally unprepossessing but with eyes that were wide, active and aware. I told her that I thought the poodle the best thing in the room, and that her miniature garden should have won first prize. I asked her whether she did art. She said she did. I asked her whether she had ever given any thought to sculpture. No.

And so I explained that the sculptor’s art is to see the remarkable in the mundane and apply such process as is necessary to enable others to see it too, just as she had with the poodle. She smiled, and that was that.

I wonder whether a seed will grow from here. Whether it does or not is none of my business, of course, but I thought it worth planting anyway.