From 1977 to 1978 (The Boarding School Year Zero Maoist Punk Rocker Walking Oxymoron Years), I kept a series of diaries in small hardback notebooks, written in a light-hearted, semi-public manner. Proto-blogs, if you will. These I referred to, in an early flash of the faux-pompousness that would in later years become my defining global hallmark, as my “memoirs”.
Since, like so many other of the Chaps in the Dorm, I was still BIG on clever-clever Python-esque surrealism, the fourth volume of the memoirs bore the Deeply Satirical title The Exciting World Of Accountancy.
(Yeah! People with jobs = brainwashed sheep! Of course, I didn’t know then that I would end up working for 13 years in local government IT. Ah, how the heady idealism of youth is dashed upon the rocks of the pragmatism of adulthood. Or something.)
Round about this time, the British army was running a series of recruitment advertisements with the slogan: The Professionals. If you’ve got it, we’ll bring it out. This provided all the inspiration I needed for the back cover art of The Exciting World Of Accountancy.
Despite being thrown into the garbage by my wicked stepmother in the Great Cultural Purge Of The Early 1980s, the memory of this back cover has for some reason remained with me ever since. Having recently reconstructed it for Demian’s Guild Of Guestbloggers Fortnight, I am surprised – and somewhat disconcerted – at the accuracy of the resulting image. Like looking at an apparition from a bygone age.
This is FAR too long a build-up for a piddling little doodle. But then, to my eyes, it’s a rather poignant little doodle.
troubled diva 