mostly david ephgrave

Anyone with enough expendable income to spend £258 on a statue of a sheep clearly has more money than sense. These two woolly women have silently regarded me with their emotionless eyes from a shop window in my home town for a good few months. Unsurprisingly they’ve yet to be snapped up . Maybe they're display models and there’s a stockroom (or flockroom?) round the back full of fibreglass sheep, like a Terracotta Army protecting One Man and His Dog. Using them as window-dressing is pretty optimistic. Were they hoping to provoke an impulse buy? There can’t be many people in Hitchin with the best part of three hundred quid a burning a hole in their pocket that are looking to buy a merino sheep-substitute; it’s just too niche. You’d be better off buying the real thing; there are nine of them going on Gumtree for just $70 (£43) each, or $550 (£337) for the lot, though you’d have to ship (sheep?) them over from Australia. If you want to...

Yesterday, I saw the world’s most confident statue on sale in Garden House Hospice. Look at him standing proud amongst the bric-a-brac. It’s like he owns the shelf. He wears the expression of an ornament that thinks he won’t be without a home for long. He is the master of all he surveys; the dead men’s shoes, the non-prescription glasses, the VHS; everything . He is the King of Objet D’art. You could buy him, but you’d never, ever own him. The staff probably didn’t even put him on display; he scaled that cabinet by himself. Despite his obvious bravado, I’m suspicious. Surely he can't be that self-confident. He wound up in a charity shop. He may once have had pride of place on somebody’s mantelpiece, but he doesn’t anymore. Perhaps he made a personal bid for freedom. He probably felt infinitely superior to everything in the household.   Arrogant little tit.