Carp Girls Calendar (2019)
For practical purposes I use a couple of wall planner calendars that I’ve designed myself. A large wall planner in my computer room and a smaller A3 planner on my kitchen wall. I’ve often also had some other kind of picture based calendar as well, but not ones I’d done myself. In late 2018 I decided to make myself an amusing calendar, but I didn’t really know what it should be. It was always going to involve my face photoshopped into other images but I had no idea what that should be. I spent some time looking about online and then I stumbled upon a carp fishing magazine that had yearly calendars of young attractive models holding happy and bewildered looking live fish. This seemed an incongruous combination that was too bizarre and funny to not adapt.
Work can be a tedious drain on my will to live at the best of times. Sometimes it’s fun to break up the day with a smile, so in June of 2019 I was showing a male colleague the calendar I made of my face photoshopped onto those scantily clad girls holding fish today and my new manager saw it out of the corner of her eye.
A few minutes later I was hauled off for a documented “fact-finding” meeting that is usually the precursor to a disciplinary hearing. I was asked if I thought it was appropriate to have such materials at work (despite her not even having properly seen it or known what it was) and could I see how someone might take offence etc? Well, frankly, no.. No one I have ever shown it to (including several female managers at work) have ever taken the faintest offence and usually just find my little projects like that funny and creative.