mostly david ephgrave

The downside of writing a blog post every day is you'll sometimes think of a subject, only for a quick Google to reveal you’ve already written about it. Such was the case today. It didn’t help that I set to work quite late, after spending a couple of hours sifting through old posts looking for ideas for stand-up. The sift proved lucrative, but left me creatively spent. There’s only so much of my own writing I can take in one sitting. When it came to thinking of something new, I kept drawing blanks. That was until I remembered a conversation I’d had with my friend Steve earlier this week. We were talking about caricaturists – as you do – when I recounted the story of the time I posed for one as a kid. For some reason, I took it upon myself to pull a weird face to help the artist out; briefly forgetting which of us was supposed to be doing the caricaturing. In doing this, I scuppered myself, ending up with a picture looking nothing like me. I thought this would be good...

Today, I popped by my friend Sarah ’s studio to exchange Christmas cards. While I was there, she made me a cup of tea in a Take That mug. This gave me ample opportunity to pull my ‘holding a Take That mug’-face. (Twat.) I never realised I had a ‘holding a Take That mug’-face until I posed for the picture - when, all too soon, it became apparent. All it took was a couple of seconds of being looked at through a viewfinder for my natural, relaxed expression to be replaced with a gurny, pointy, cuppy-holdy one. This is often the case when someone gets out a camera (except for the cup-holding bit). This leads to me to worry that in years to come, all that will be left of me will be a string of face-pulling photographs. It reminds me of the time I posed for a caricaturist as a kid. For some, inexplicable reason, I decided to pull a face throughout the sitting that I’d never done before or since. He picked up...