Made You Look

Day 14 - 8:12am, 14 January 2019 

I'm slightly later in setting off for work today, and I notice a big difference in the light, though not as much as the image might suggest - Apple very thoughtfully asked if it could sort out the lighting on the photo for me and, though slightly affronted to have been judged by my phone, I agreed. (Particularly harsh, given that I was had just worked out how to switch motion off.) And so dawn is magically transformed into bright daylight.

And there was another thing that happened later that brightened my day, this time no technology involved. Making my way to the collection point in Marks & Spencers, an assistant is carrying a mannequin up the escalator toward me. Nothing unusual about that, perhaps, but the fact that she is carrying the full-length model at waist height means that it towers over the shoppers on the escalator, who being ahead of the mannequin are none the wiser of its presence. It is made all the funnier because the dummy is slung across the assistant's shoulder facing away from her, so it looks like a fireman's lift gone wrong or as if she is about to toss a caber. Either way, it is looking fifty-fifty as to whether the assistant and the mannequin make it up the escalator in one piece. 

They do and I catch myself thinking, I like that dress it's wearing. Then, I wonder if I would have even clocked the mannequin had it been stationery. Carrying on, two of the dummies on display in the lingerie department are in yoga poses. I notice the first on the way up. The figure is in tree pose and I envy its alignment, but I am more taken by trying to work out how they put the model into such a pose, and hardly register the clothes being modeled. I do not even notice the second plastic dummy until I pass it again on the way down and this model appears to be in a deep warrior two-like pose. I care even less about what this one is wearing.

Instead, I can imagine a whole viral campaign - store assistants filmed criss-crossing shop floors carrying their artificial partners over their shoulders. It would certainly catch your eye.