The Green Man

The first sip of beer smells like lipstick - grease and perfume. I check the rim of the glass, and sure enough there it is. I wonder who it was left their mark here.
It's early evening, and I look around the bar - which in these brave fresh days of underemployment is fast becoming a haunt. It's quiet. Just me, a group of young ladies at a nearby table and the usual barflies.

I was in Buxton recently - that great slab of Victoriana. Under a grey sky we celebrated the birthday of one of a vanishingly small number of people that actually warrant genuine celebration. In doing so, we stumbled into the Buxton Museum. The museum was, we discovered, notable for two reasons. The first discovery was hidden away in a corner: a Fiji Mermaid. An absurd and quite horrible 19th century carnival curiosity, now perhaps best remembered for an X-Files episode ("Humbug" - if memory serves). If you haven't been introduced, this is a monkey's head and body grafted onto a fish's tail - designed to trick our forebears into believing the sailors were right all along. Seeing this famous old hoax firsthand surprised and delighted me - especially since it was so sneakingly tucked away, to the point that you had to all but slither on your belly in order to see it. If I had been in charge, there would be a large glowing sign above the main doors, "Roll Up: SEE the Fiji Mermaid - disturbing wonder of the modern age." But I'm not in charge.

"The seaweed is always greener in somebody else's lake, you dream about going up there but that is a big mistake..."

The second discovery would have delighted my Dad.
Since Dad died back in December, I've missed his regular updates online. His photos and interesting links once punctuated the day, but alas, no longer. I still pass by his Facebook page though and check his Twitter - some small part of me expecting to find new things there. The modern world has turned me into a digital Greyfriars Bobby, patiently awaiting the return of my master. Waiting for his dry wit. Waiting for the photos to start flowing again. Of course, they don't. However, occasionally I see something that I know Dad would have posted - and it is so radiantly clear, I have to do so myself. As here with The Green Man from Buxton Museum.

Dad loved gargoyles and stone carvings - and he liked The Green Man in particular.
The Green Man from an age long passed. Dad would have been thrilled to see him. I certainly was. I looked at those familiar features and smiled.
I donated a couple of two-pound coins, which chinkingly thudded into what sounded like a healthy enough pile of coins below. I hope it was. We need places like Buxton Museum (a small place with friendly staff and free entry), and in these times of austerity I worry that those in power don't always see the value themselves.

Meanwhile, I weigh up taking my lipstick smeared glass back to the bar, and I find myself thinking about the Fiji Mermaid. We're not so very different, she and I. A relic from another age which once amused the passers-by, both entirely unsuited to deep water, and both resolutely forgotten on the shelf...
I'm snapped from my stock-self-indulgence by a young lady from the next table. She explains that it's a birthday, and that she'd like me to take a picture of her with her friends. She hands me her phone. Seizing the opportunity, the others hand me their phones too. "...Do you mind?" the fifth one asks me, tilting her head.
This is the world we have made for ourselves: Witnessed through a rectangular window, preserved in vertical video. But no, I do not mind.
I take the first photo, but the angles are all wrong. I get down on one knee in front of them all, as though I am about to sing or propose. While I'm distracted, someone clears away my glass assuming I've left. I juggle the phones and take the photos, but I don't have the eye for a really good shot - I never have had.

I go home and flick through some of Dad's old photographs. The kind you had to send away to be developed. The kind you laboured over taking and didn't just fire and forget.
I choose a pack at random from the box of hundreds and flick through. A catalogue of snows long melted, dogs and cats departed, houses as they once were. And there, from somewhere in the heart of the 1980s, a Green Man - snapped by Dad up in the eaves of a church so long ago. I stare at the photo and think back to the Green Man of Buxton. Eventually our ages do pass. We are all in the end museum pieces in waiting, and people will wander among our old photographs and curiosities and the marks we've left... If we're lucky they'll look back on us and remember fondly.