I had a dream the other night that my friend Kirsty had invited me to a party, and all the guests had to come bearing potatoes. This was a strange thing to dream, since Kirsty doesn’t look like one of the world’s great potato eaters.
I think the reason for the dream was that I’d been thinking about Henry Cueco, a French artist and writer who among many other things painted portraits of potatoes.
He did lemons as well
But it’s the potatoes that really move me.
He also wrote a book, untranslated into English as far as I know, titled Le journal d’une pomme de terre,
in which (I think given my poor French) he imagines himself to be a potato. This is my own dodgy translation, with some online help:
‘My poor mother was not, strictly speaking, a potato. Yet I often dream that I am sprouting, my body covered in manure and earth, blissfully budding. My father was not familiar with potatoes, his preferred starch was rice. I never saw him look carefully at a potato, although he was interested in the voluptuous forms of women. ‘
There’s just something about potatoes. They have character, personality, they have eyes, and (especially if you draw on them) they even have faces.
It almost seems a shame to eat them
Almost.
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